2024-04-18_backlabs1.txt

Date: Thu, 18 Apr 2024 22:42:47 +0000
To: psi29a, Marc Zinnschlag (zinnschlag), AnyOldName3,
 Anton Uramer (uramer), Chris Robinson (chriskcat),
 Pieter van der Kloet (pvdk), jvoisin
From: backlabs1
Subject: Problems with an OpenMW GitLab group owner

Hi all,

I am sending this message about a problem with an OpenMW group owner.
You are included in the recipients because you are listed as either an
owner or a maintainer in the OpenMW group on GitLab [1].

On 2021-04-18, TES3MP commits f6887559f6 [2] and cf4ff3513f [3] changed
the TES3MP license from the standard GPLv3 used by OpenMW to a GPLv3
license with section 7 [4] additional restrictions. It is not legal to
re-license code without permission from all copyright holders, which
includes OpenMW contributors and TES3MP contributors up to the point of
the license change, and code merged in from OpenMW after the license change.

In the last few months, I have started working on TES3MP, hoping to
contribute to both TES3MP and OpenMW. (I have a TES3MP fork hosted on
Codeberg [5] where I hoped to try out larger changes than I expected to
be readily merged to TES3MP.) I opened three TES3MP pull requests that
were accepted by David Cernat. At some point during this time, I noticed
that the TES3MP license was not the same as the OpenMW license.

On 2024-04-12, I opened a TES3MP issue about this, hoping it was a
misunderstanding that could be easily resolved, but after some
discussion the issue was abruptly deleted. You can see all the comments,
which include some additional details, on archive.org [6]. Also, the
three merge requests of mine (that were previously accepted and merged)
were discarded and the default branch force-pushed without them. You can
see the missing commits and changes here [7].

On 2024-04-17, I opened an OpenMW issue about this, not realizing that
the developer also has owner permissions on the OpenMW GitLab project.
After a small amount of discussion, and about 14 hours after it was
opened, that issue too was deleted. You can see the issue, missing the
comments, on archive.org [8]. (I have all the missing comments as email
messages; AnyOldName3 and Chris Robinson may have some of them too,
having commented there.)

Later on 2024-04-17, I opened a Dreamweave-MP issue [9] because the
licensing problem also exists on that TES3MP fork, it was a public space
where David Cernat probably does not have permission to delete content,
and I prefer to keep all discussion public. However, I realize now that
I could jeopardize the entire OpenMW project by continuing the
discussion publicly: since David Cernat is an owner in the OpenMW GitLab
group [1], he may have permission to delete entire repositories. He may
also have access to other OpenMW infrastructure. He has already deleted
two discussions and discarded three previously-accepted merge requests.
Perhaps there have already been other incidents in the past.

So as a random contributor who had his work discarded but wants to see
OpenMW and TES3MP succeed, I ask two questions:

- Is anyone keeping current backups of OpenMW infrastructure, including
all the GitLab project data?
- What can I do to help resolve this problem?

Thanks,
backlabs1

[1]: <https://gitlab.com/groups/OpenMW/-/group_members>
[2]:
<https://github.com/TES3MP/TES3MP/commit/f6887559f6baa2aa94847ee8341045ffeffdac8f>
[3]:
<https://github.com/TES3MP/TES3MP/commit/cf4ff3513f25574c6c79377c09fe72e95c2ee069>
[4]: <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html#section7>
[5]: <https://codeberg.org/backlabs1/TES3MP/>
[6]:
<https://web.archive.org/web/20240417051934/https://github.com/TES3MP/TES3MP/issues/685>
[7]:
<https://github.com/TES3MP/TES3MP/compare/49be5b6405d6ab427e06ed350cf76c715a1f3bdd...backlabs1:TES3MP:tes3mp-0.8.1-snapshot>
[8]:
<http://web.archive.org/web/20240418043925/https://gitlab.com/OpenMW/openmw/-/issues/7935>
[9]: <https://github.com/DreamWeave-MP/Dreamweave/issues/89>