Android++, native development and debugging for Visual Studio, now open-source

However, the language defining step (b) ("granted by Justin Webb with the permission of NaturalMotion Limited") is hand-wavy and doesn't spell out exactly what rights are granted, so I would agree that this seems legally pretty shaky. What rights is NaturalMotion intending to reserve by including the following sentence? If there are any, do they conflict with the ability to redistribute under a BSD license? If there are none, why is that sentence there ar all?

Except it's used under license from naturalmotion, and naturalmotion owns the code (hence the copyright naturalmotion).

Yet, naturalmotion explicitly grants no rights.

I can state affirmatively this makes no sense :)

As I said, either they've granted rights (through justin), in which case that statement that they grant no rights should not be there (because they are in fact, granting rights) Or they haven't granted rights (through justin), in which case it's not open source and who knows what rights you are getting here.

As mentioned, naturalmotion could actually probably sue every downloader/user for copyright infringement. Would they? Who knows.

Now practically, most of the time you are right. The problem is what is practical now doesn't always stay that way. Companies get acquired, change owners, people's monetary situation changes, etc. More often than not shit gets weird before rights get extinguished.

So my experience is that 90-95% of the time, you are right, nobody cares, it all goes according to plan.

The other 5-10% of the time, it requires lawyers and a lot of money to unf*ck it.

Hacker news rarely hears about these cases, sadly.

So sure, if you want to play the odds, go for it. But I find engineers are very Laissez-faire about this kind of thing right up until it comes down on them like a ton of bricks.

I'm thinking that they are talking about forking within the GitHub infrastructure, which means having the same code in multiple locations within GitHub (as a copy). The licensing doesn't change when the code is forked.

"By uploading their code to a public GitHub repository, they agree to GitHub's terms of service[1], which grants other users additional rights to this code. "

This has literally never been upheld in court, nor is it likely to be upheld in a way that people want (see the above parts about what rights it really covers), to be frank :)

Additionally, it would be inapplicable in this case.

You can't give away rights you don't have. Note that NaturalMotion didn't upload this, Justin did.

If you upload some Google owned source code, you haven't suddenly granted rights on behalf of Google, you've just likely committed copyright infringement.

Someone relying on the github license grant (ie a viewer or downloader) would still be a copyright infringer, and in turn try to use the "innocent infringement" defense (17 USC 504(c)(2)). They would fall neatly into the category of people who believed they had a license to use it. The problem, of course,is that this defense is eliminated completely by the presence of the notice. See 17 USC 401(d).

So the people who downloaded and used it would be screwed as well, despite whatever github has written here :)

(I have no evidence or position on whether the result would be different if naturalmotion knew or acquiesced explicitly to the uploading to github. But then you'd still hit the same viewing and forking rights are not the same as downloading and using rights, and it's highly unlikely you would convince a court they are the same).