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Comment by randommodnar | Hacker News Reader

MIT license? Is open-source dying?

I was going to say it only takes about 30 seconds to fork and change the license if you want to. Then I decided to check if someone had already done so. Yep. https://github.com/ivegotasthma/coreutils/commit/4c7dcbd912a...

I didn't count, but that may have taken less than 30 seconds.

Is that valid? The original license had:

  > The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
  > included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

As those have now been stripped away, it seems like a license violation.

You don't have to be a lawyer to recognize that as a genuine bona fide electrified six-car copyright violation. You just have to be able to read.

I don't like this trend of new projects choosing weak free software licenses. It's as though they wish to ignore the history of the world they live in -- free software would not exist in the form it does today without copyleft. Copyleft is the one defense free software developers have against corporate monopolies and proprietary splitting. For some reason though, everyone who works in $NewLang seems to not care about this at all.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it"

I'd like to think that in the future when "the open-source bubble" bursts and companies fall back to 70s-era mentality, developers would rediscover why free software is important and a new movement would would be born.

Sadly, I think hardware be permanently locked down by then. Perhaps by FCC-style law.

the question seems non sequitur.

if you prefer "is free software dying"?

The MIT license is free and open source.

https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#X11License

Maybe "copyleft" or "reciprocal" licensing?

Without copyleft, we wouldn't have free software in the form it is today.

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