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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

I'm not misreading it. The license says we cannot fork the software. That's not open source.

They had better start paying their lawyers overtime. You can't do a PR without forking and people fork on Github for a multitude of reasons (I often fork into a group as a lazy form of bookmarking or collecting projects).

Hell. I just clicked the 'fork' button. Where's my cease and desist?

I would argue that GitHub should remove this software. It just runs counter with their TOS.

A PR isn't the only way to contribute. You can also check out the repo and send in patch files.

Just wondering: for lazy repo bookmarking, why fork rather than star?

For me, forks are like super stars. I have an order of magnitude more stars than forks.

Isn't a different interpretation that a fork is, presumably, their software _plus_ your modification(s)? Thus, a fork is not "solely" their software anymore and is allowed.

Yes, but forking on GitHub means that initially it will be just their software.

The issue people are (rightly, imo) pointing out is that forking without modifications—say, to remain locked to a particular commit for whatever reasons one may have—appears to directly violate the terms of the custom license (which itself appears to directly violate the terms of Github's TOS.

If I understand right, you can fork it and even redistribute it, as long as your software isn't a blatant plagiarism of this repo. So technically, taking this library and putting it together with some other library yielding some meaningful application is enough to satisfy that clause.

I read it as only allowing you to redistribute unmodified copies, because clause 3 only permits modification "for your own internal use."

Also, even if were to improve on it and release it as a fork, as an example, it still falls into the definition of "software" and is in violation of the terms.

Do you have access to the source? Yes? It's open source.

Open Source need not be free as in beer, nor as in freedom.

No. Call that "source available", "source access" or something, but "Open Source" is pretty much established to be defined by the OSI definition of the term: https://opensource.org/osd

The OSI should trademark the phrase "open source". License it for anyone claiming their software is open source (as defined by OSI), and send cease and desists to anyone who is using the phase incorrectly.

They can't:

We have discovered that there is virtually no chance that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office would register the mark "open source"; the mark is too descriptive. Ironically, we were partly a victim of our own success in bringing the `open source' concept into the mainstream.

https://news.slashdot.org/story/99/06/17/0213251/esr-on-the-...

> ... but "Open Source" is pretty much retconned to be defined by the OSI definition of the term

"Open source" as a term or development methodology is older than both the OSI definition and the Debian manual it is based on.

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