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Wow, I'm late to this, but having a lawyer send a letter to a student's university to try to get them in trouble for open source contributions they made on their own time is very not ok.

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Renlord

@renlord1

Feb 7, 2021

Replying to @renlord1 @_copperj and @jack

2/ You even tried to get me into trouble with my University by insinuating false claims such as my violation of university policy which is completely false and untrue. renlord.com/letters/uni-bo

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Hard to tell as an outsider who's right about the original issue in the thread (i.e. not this letter portion), but not 20 minutes ago the same person shameforwarded someone's tweet to their employer so it doesn't seem like they've learned much about proper discourse

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I mean, it's not that hard to form a weak opinion on the original issue, but holy shit you don't lawyer-letter a PhD student's university. Fuck that. I wouldn't care even if he was right.

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and

He did this to

because he helped with porting my open source work on hardening Bionic libc to a newer version of Android. The work was published under open source licenses and I'm the author and owner of it. Copperhead agreed to sponsor my work under those terms.

2:15 AM · Feb 7, 2021Twitter Web App

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and

Yep, that was my understanding too and I believe it, but I wanted to stress that regardless of the details of how work-for-hire law interacts with your agreement or whatever legal details, ONE DOESN'T MAIL THE UNIVERSITY OF A PHD STUDENT OVER IT.

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and

They've done worse than this too: they've threatened contributors that are under 18 after looking into their internet footprint and trying to find a way to intimidate them. They've posted people's personal addresses too while making it seem like it was part of a legal process.

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It's possible to look at archives of it on GitHub and see that it was published that way. I temporarily re-licensed my work under a non-commercial usage license from January 2017 to around June 2018. I never assigned copyright to the company, and my project predates the company.

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Their position is that they somehow magically got copyright ownership over the entirety of my past, present and future work without any agreement of that kind. It goes against the explicit agreements we had that developers owned their work. That is what we told people too.

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