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It's a strange case to begin with:

The readme of the first public release says:

nv.d3 - v0.0.1

A reusable chart library for d3 by Bob Monteverde of Novus Partners.

The license later said that the copyright belonged to Novus, (not Montaverde), under the GPL v3.

This means that they couldn't (nor could anyone) use the Free contributions in closed source products.

Since Montaverde is responsible for ~95% of the code (https://github.com/RobertLowe/nvd3/graphs/contributors) and he sounds embarrassed by the ordeal, it looks like a dick move by someone above him at Novus.



Hi,

Thanks, that's my fork, it's was released under Apache 2.0.

https://github.com/RobertLowe/nvd3/blob/master/LICENSE.md

* 2. Grant of Copyright License.

* Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare Derivative Works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute the Work and such Derivative Works in Source or Object form.

Irrevocable copyright, I love it. It will stay open source and hosted there.

Bob should not be all to blame. Novus is clearly handling this poorly.

EDIT:

I'll accept pull requests, and if anyone had issues, please repost them.


Thanks for your stand, Rob. If anyone doubts that Novus knew about this project, consider that it was hosted on the official company github account and was sitting there under an open source license for almost a year. Take a look for yourself in the job ad posted on HN in September: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4463689 It's even referred to as "open-source" in the ad. I'm guessing that when Bob asked if he could build an open source library to use with company projects, his boss told him "sure, knock yourself out". But now his boss's boss, or maybe the CEO, sees how nice it looks and wants to put the genie back in the bottle.

Luckily, "un" open sourcing projects under Apache, BSD, MIT, GPL, etc. is not so easy.


Here's a direct link to the job posting, since it was hidden behind the "more" link for me: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4464588

Also, the poster (wheaties) is not Bob, since they mention Bob in the third person a few times in other posts.




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