[randy408]

Not a lawyer, but I _highly_ doubt the MIT license makes any difference when it comes to the author's demands in this situation, he has moral rights (legal term) to the software.

You can't just make a mess of packaging someone's work and assume there's no legal avenue for the author, that's just naive.

[wvenable]

This is the text of the license (emphasis mine):

"Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so."

The license clearly and explicitly grants the ability to make a mess of packaging the work. One could translate it into BASIC and use it to launch rockets at whales in the pacific ocean and that would be granted by this license.

[randy408]

Moral rights are unalienable in Europe, I'm not gonna quote a full paragraph from Wikipedia[1] here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights

[aethertron]

Then they're incompatible with FOSS. If someone

- releases code under MIT/GPL/whatever, declaring that their work may be changed and redistributed

- then later asserts their moral right to NOT have their code changed and redistributed

then they have done a nasty bait-and-switch move. The have shown themselves dishonest, and using their software should be considered a legally dangerous idea. If their courts support their claims then FOSS, as we know it, is unviable in that realm.

But this hasn't ever happened, has it? Europe's FOSS development activity seems robust enough. But perhaps they are legally on a sand foundation...

[randy408]

Moral rights are part of the Berne Convention, it's not limited to Europe.

This is only an issue when someone 1. is very negligent with redistribution 2. has enough negative implications for the author to take issue with it.

NixOS is a big, funded project, what's wrong with holding them to a standard? If they package it right then moral rights wouldn't be an issue for them, it's not exactly a legal minefield.

[rcxdude]

The question then becomes what amounts to 'packaging it right' and who is the judge of that? It's certainly not so simple as the sole opinion of the author, at the very least they would need to demonstrate some damage to their reputation or similar.

[aethertron]

>Moral rights are part of the Berne Convention, it's not limited to Europe.

Not everywhere has unalienable ones. You can waive them in the UK and USA, which is what publishing under a FOSS license implies, to an extent.

Anyway, moral rights aren't just about mangling a work. It's about mangling work in a way that makes the original author look bad. But with software, with the internet, no matter how bad the mangling, you can Google the author and find, say, his disgruntled Github comments stating his disapproval of the changes, so no reputational damage should accrue. Moral rights violation: nullified. Eh?

[shakna]

> The license clearly and explicitly grants the ability to make a mess of packaging the work.

The license _may_, however, moral rights to the software also include "right to the integrity of the work", where badly packaging the software may actually infringe.

That right isn't something the MIT license can simply override or ignore. There are plenty of rights that a person _can't_ surrender, based on the originating jurisdiction.

For example, the oft-criticised Unlicense includes this statement:

> In jurisdictions that recognize copyright laws, the author or authors of this software dedicate any and all copyright interest in the software to the public domain.

However, in many jurisdictions that recognise copyright laws, the author has an inherit and implicit right to copyright, but simultaneously do _not_ have the right to surrender it, and cannot dedicate anything into the public domain, making said license completely irrelevant.

Just because the legal document says something, doesn't mean it can actually do something.

[wvenable]

Providing a license is not surrendering copyright -- in fact, just the opposite. In order for anyone to make a copy of a copyrighted work they must have a license to do so. The license sets the terms of that copying. This is the fundamental aspect all copyright.

I don't see how if the license says that one can modify and repackage the work without limitation or restriction that the person providing that license can argue for any violation of the integrity of work. If they can they copyleft is effectively dead.

[dragonwriter]

> Not a lawyer, but I _highly_ doubt the MIT license makes any difference when it comes to the author's demands in this situation, he has moral rights (legal term) to the software.

Under what legal theory would moral rights be relevant?