Hacker News Reader

The name and the license are two separate issues.

I agree the name is confusing, however this is not intentional. As I explained in the other comment, I chose duplicacy because the domain name was available and this is a very good name for a backup tool (even better than duplicity).

I chose this fair source license because this is basically the only free-for-personal-use license. Many people here ask why I didn't go with a free license like GPL. Here is why. I believe software should be free for personal users, but I don't like for-profit companies using it for free. This software can potentially help companies solve a painful everyday problem (and therefore make more money) and yet there isn't a license to require them to pay if they don't distribute the software. In my opinion, this is extremely unfair to independent developers like me.

The naming clash is unfortunate, but will at some point become inevitable as more tools doing the same thing (de-duplicating backup in this case) are created.

GitHub does not restrict licensing on their public repositories; I'm not interested in declaring myself a shaman for the "spirit of GitHub" to address that point.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/2615869/open-source-softwar...

I do agree with this part of your post:

Not cool. Not cool at all.

Either naivety or guerilla growth hacking / marketing; we'll see how things shake out.

> Their license, however, is very much NON-FREE. As in, if I click clone, since I work for an employer of 50k people, I'm in violation. Full stop. And we're not even talking about developing on it, or submitting PR's, or what have you. This is simple copy which puts me in violation.

I'm not a lawyer, but the user cap would seem to apply to "use" of the software, not simple copying.

https://fair.io/

I wonder why someone/some org would opt for a weird non-standard license over a GPL/Commercial dual-license as is standard and court-tested... or even better try to monetise by offering support/consulting or infrastructure.

IIRC, GitHub doesn't actually impose any restrictions on what license you choose. Their ToS does grant GitHub the right to redistribute your code (for obvious reasons), among other things around GitHub's fork-and-PR model, beyond whatever licensing terms you've chosen. Valve, for example, publishes portions of their Source Engine on GitHub with a non-free license, and I'm pretty sure there are GitHub repos with CC-BY-ND-NC-whatever licenses for various non-code assets.

I don't think this is against the spirit of GitHub, either. I ain't GitHub, though, so that opinion is by no means authoritative.

All this is different from, say, SourceForge, where using SourceForge to host your code did (does?) require licensing your code under a FOSS license.

----

Regardless, still scummy to take a name so close to an existing actually-FOSS project with similar goals. Additionally scummy to call the license "fair" (if it ain't free, it ain't fair), though that's probably not the developer's fault.

> Here's a few names I just devised: ClouDuplicate , Clouder, DupliCloud, CfC (cloud file cloud)..

Or you know, since it's written in Go, how about GoDuplicate, GoBackup, etc.

I like giving people the benefit of the doubt, but it's just so similar and they have so many obvious pun options that even the most uncreative person probably would have come up with a more unique name.

"bup - I can't believe no-one had this idea earlier!"

Wait, how's it masquerading as what?

The name is very similar to the GPL software Duplicity, and the license is not a free software license.

While I'd agree it's similar, it's not the same.

Public projects on GitHub do not need to be under an open source license - there is absolutely no requirement for that anywhere.

Right, I was just explaining the "masquerading".

Also LGPLed https://www.duplicati.com/

It's a derivative work of, at least, an LGPL[0] and Apache2[1] project, but does not include any copyright notices or attribution at all.

[0] - https://github.com/gilbertchen/goamz/blob/master/LICENSE

[1] - https://github.com/gilbertchen/azure-sdk-for-go/blob/master/...

Wait, I thought this submission was for Duplicati (https://www.duplicati.com/), which I used (very happily I might add) in the past for cloud backups of my server to S3.