[lnsp]

> Litestream has a new home at Fly.io, but it is and always will be an open-source project. My plan for the next several years is to keep making it more useful, no matter where your application runs, and see just how far we can take the SQLite model of how databases can work.

As far as I understood it, Fly.io hired the person working on Litestream and pays them to keep working on Litestream.

[tiffanyh]

That’s how I understood it and that’s radically different than how this HN post got titled.

Ben Johnson confirms how you framed it here:

https://mobile.twitter.com/benbjohnson/status/15237489883352...

[tptacek]

We wrote a different title for this blog post, and we did in fact buy Litestream (to the extent that anyone can "buy" a FOSS project, of course).

[apgwoz]

> (to the extent that anyone can "buy" a FOSS project, of course).

Does this mean that, in addition to offering a salary / options, you provided some sort of additional one-time compensation for copyright assignment?

[fastball]

All the code that has already been written/published already has the FOSS license (in this case APLv2). No take-backsies.

So presumably no, there was not a one-time compensation for copyright assignment.

[apgwoz]

> All the code that has already been written/published already has the FOSS license (in this case APLv2). No take-backsies.

You do realize that this fact does not entitle you to the copyright of the work, right? It entitles you to use it, modify, redistribute, etc, with continued attribution of the copyright holders.

As such, copyright re-assignment is possible for any code that Ben wrote. And, any contributions are probably a grey area of sorts since there was probably no agreement of copyright assignment when contributing as there is in some projects. Any who.

[fastball]

So if I take code that was released with a license like the APLv2, at any point the person that wrote that code can change the license and then sue me for using the code without permission? That doesn't sound right.