Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by input_sh 1726 days ago
> They have multiple contributors who don't assign copyright.

But that doesn't guarantee they wouldn't if Jellyfin approached them like "here's $X for writing this code". Or try hiring them from the start and asking them to sign a contract that transfers their copyright over to the company. Or maybe the contributors would tell them no, make a media fuss about it, and then Jellyfin's team could track down their commits and just re-write them.

Of course, I'm not saying that this will happen, nor I am saying that the Jellyfin's team will even make an attempt at going down this road, but the fact that it's open sourced at the moment is not a guarantee that it wouldn't be in the future.

Emby had a fair amount of contributors as well (https://github.com/MediaBrowser/Emby/graphs/contributors) and then they've just stopped pushing more commits to it. As far as I'm aware, none of those people sued them.

1 comments

It only takes one to refuse though.

Sure you can find and rewrite that person's contributions, but that person can also fork again.