How were the contributions by Richard Caley handled? "The legal reality was harsh: Richard’s contributions to Conquer couldn’t be relicensed. The university couldn’t help contact heirs due to privacy laws."
Author of the article here. Richard's contributions remain in the codebase but under original terms.
We documented his legacy as a person, and that is explained in the README of the repository.
The notion that everything had to be relicensed under the GPL “so it could be properly preserved and packaged for modern Linux distributions” seems pretty silly.
It's a ticking time bomb that distributors are steering clear of for good reason. You are correct that current copyright law is pretty silly, but that silly law is frequently enforced by serious courts.
