[striking]

>which blatantly flies in the face of copywright law unchallenged

How do you figure? Patent law isn't copyright law, and doesn't apply equally around the world.

>why do so many open-source projects get ridiculously anal about license issues

Because it's their code and people are using it without compensation and in ways not amenable to them? I think you'd be pretty "anal", too, if someone took your software that you worked hard on, without wanting to contribute their improvements and without any other form of compensation.

x264 basically funds VLC. Don't steal other people's code.

[dooglius]

Stealing code isn't at issue here, the scenario is that developers are not incorporating new timezone data because the open-source license for that data is only printed the README, not in the timezone data file itself. This is the sort of thing I'm calling anal.