SoFurry loses custom chat after coder copyright claim

"And how in the flying fuck is a total of five messages, all legitimately in response to conversation, even close to spamming? He called it “flaming” a few minutes prior, which is it? (The correct answer is neither; it’s called “trolling”. A site administrator ought to know that, and at least pick the right reason for administrative actions.)"

He should stick with color scheming and working on his own website and should certainly not pick defense attorney as his career of choice, he just basically admitted guilt there.

I'd like to make the following statement about this:

1) DigitalMan joined the sofurry team and worked as a contributor. He contributed parts to a larger whole, especially since the chat already existed well before he joined the team. I do not want to diminish his role in the chat development, for he contributed important parts to the chat. His contributions include an improved userlist, ban functions, ignore function, various chat commands, chat user settings, various chat refresh improvements, many chat frontend improvements, and the PM outbox. That he now claims never to have been part of the team however is dubious at best: He had a SVN account, dev mailinglist access, and access to all the other facilities used by our developers, and he was accepted as a team member, not an "outside developer". His work was a result of discussions and interactions with other developers. Key parts of the chat were developed by MJTF, Morghus and myself. And of course we have the SVN logs and emails to prove this. Whether or not he "feels" to have been part of the team today is of no consequence, the fact is that while he was given relatively free reign over the improvements made to the chat, he ultimately did that: improvements.

2) I strongly disagree with the notion that a former contributor can just pull out the very bricks he donated to a building, just because he is no longer part of the building team. DigitalMan was well aware that his contributions became part of SoFurry and he never stated that he did not want this when he joined or while he contributed to SoFurry 1.0. It's only over a year after he was removed from the development team that he started objecting to us using code he previously committed to our SVN.
DigitalMan claims that copyrights were never transferred - this may or may not be true, though permission can be given either implicitly or explicitly. The dispute is whether or not such a permission can be retracted lateron or not, and whether he implicitly gave permission to use his contributions by committing it to our SVN with the clear intention of having them become part of SoFurry.

It is our belief that since he did not write "the chat module" but only contributed parts of it, and his parts don't work on their own but need a chat core code to go with it (which was not written by him), implicit permission was given and cannot just be yanked away lateron.

3) Some parts of the copyright claim by DigitalMan are incorrect. For example, the chat userlist backend code was completely rewritten by myself to increase performance after he was removed from the dev team. The "PM outbox" code was a copy/paste affair of the existing inbox code with minor alterations, and such code duplication can hardly be called original work when only a handful of lines have been modified from the original function. Other parts were indeed his contributions, but as per point 1 and 2 I question the validity of a sudden change of heart and/or the "retraction of permission".

4) DigitalMan has not contributed any code to SoFurry 2.0, the few commits he made have been removed from our code repositories roughly a year ago.

5) Contrary to the statements made by DigitalMan, we have received confirmation from both a lawyer AND a written statement by the legal department of our US ISP that the DMCA notice has to be reacted upon within 24 hours, regardless of whether we agree or can prove otherwise. We can issue a counter-notice, which would then result in the ability for DigitalMan to file a lawsuit. Until we file such a counter-notice, Save Harbor provisions apply. I only mention this here because DigitalMan has claimed that our US ISP "examined the code for similarities", which is false.

6) We are in talks with our legal counsel and are considering our options here, but frankly, the fact that work on the 2.0 chat is progressing makes a costly legal conflict a questionable endeavor. But that, and any other legal steps, are for our lawyer to decide over the coming days. It may be that while the urge to fight back tempts for a legal defense against the DMCA, the best choice for our users could be focusing on the new 2.0 chat instead.

7) I do not condone the sharing of internal email conversations from the dev mailinglist - made public despite the fact that this was specifically forbidden.

8) Addressing that email by Alex Vance, our goal is and was to provide the best possible service for our almost 200.000 users. Furthermore, that email is pretty old and our current todo list includes both alternate designs as well as user-customizable color schemes, to be implemented after the switchover from 1.0 to 2.0 - I think if you look into the way SoFurry 2.0 has progressed, you will find that we're going back and re-working parts that don't work quite right, like for example the watchlist which is being completely re-implemented right now, using an improved layout and a much faster backend.
Also, another little fact: We had color customization during the early days of SF 2.0 development. We disabled (but didn't remove it) when the layout was being finalized. It will become part of SF 2.0 again in due time.

We've revisited many of our decisions in the past, and I think that's the major strong point of SoFurry: Our development is centered around user demands. Almost all the items on our short-term todo list at http://beta.sofurry.com/report/progress are based on user feedback - in fact you'll find that the "Watch folder/series feature" requested from a user in another flayrah news article is on there. Color customization is not on our short-term list, but it is scheduled for after 2.0 replaces 1.0, which will happen soon.

Finally, I wish DigitalMan would focus on his own site. I'm more than happy to let the matter rest, time will tell if DigitalMan sees it the same way.

Another small update: At the very least something good has come out already. Thanks to the consultations we've received so far, all our developers are now signing a CLA which should prevent such issues from reoccuring the future. Going into a collaborative software project, I never would've anticipated having a legal dispute over code ownership against against a former contributor. The SoFurry dev team and I have certainly learned a lot from this incident, and I hope we can leave this whole thing behind us as soon as possible.
Another side effect is that our devs are very motivated after these events.

I'd say both are very positive outcomes.

I really disagree with that philosophy of "knowing better" if your users want customization and it won't break the site for everyone else, give it to them, don't be a snobby designer prick.

I'm sorry, but I have to say it: This is why you use an open-source system like Drupal. I count a half-dozen chat modules at least for it, all of them free and without the threat of copright claims like this one.

Alex Vance here.

DigitalMan was a prick to quote out-of-context, year-old e-mails from an internal discussion board. While I think it's a pretty dim-witted move on his part, quoting his quotes as part of this article is legitimate.

For the record, the quotes in the above article and DM's blog are selected excerpts from a longer discussion among the internal SoFurry dev team from about a year ago. That's it.

To take these context-free snippets as some sort of statement of SoFurry's policy or my guiding attitudes toward users in general and SoFurry specifically would be silly.

Now why didn't anyone tell me about this? I am amused!