Storyboarder: free, cross-platform storyboard tool

Under what license may I utilize this piece of software?

Because open source has a very specific definition which the licensing on this application does not conform to. The ability to produce derived works is a key attribute of open source.

And I understand that these are your thoughts, but what I'm looking for is a clear and legally enforceable license, which seems to still be missing.

https://web.archive.org/web/20180130105751/https://wonderuni... reads like the output of a text generator trained on two newsgroups: One focussing on conspiracy theories, the other on Open Source licensing.

You are obviously trying to underhandedly gain adoption to then turn commercial.

It's perfectly fine to give out free versions with restrictions on redistribution and commercial use. Publishing the source code in such an arrangement is even laudable.

But it is not Open Source. Those words have meaning, and I have no doubts that you know as much. E

ven if not: I assure you that 90%+ of your contributors are under the impression that they are contributing to a FOSS project as it is commonly understood.

If you are using the free Github plan, you're also breaking their terms.

This is not ok.

Well I can't actually find the license, if one even exists.

You link to your "Thoughts on Free and Open Source." from the github repo, which gives a reasonable explanation of what you are looking for in a license and why. It concludes

> So what I’m thinking based on my experience:

> MIT License + The following exceptions:

> [...]

But I can't find anything saying you've actually released the software under such a license instead of just thinking about it. Ideally the license would reside in a license file in the git repo like is fairly standard these days.

You lay out your thoughts, but you don't actually produce a license.

I get the feeling that what you want is a 'Free as in beer, not free as in speech' license with user having the ability to suggest changes to source.

People generally don't want a new license or a modified license. In my experience, software licenses at big organizations are a bereaucratic nightmare. Often, you just want something on the pre-approved list.

To a human, you do. To a lawyer, you do not.

That aside, you seem to be conflating "free as in speech" (FOSS) with "free as in beer" (freeware, or how most people treat WinRAR) in some parts of that writeup. Ardour is the usual example of software that's the former without being the latter (you can download the source code for free if you have the know-how to compile it yourself, but a donation is required to download the pre-built direclty-installable binary).

It's also problematic for educational institutions even if they happen to be tolerant of a little bit of colorful language here and there. By charging $30 a seat for the "educational" version and wanting to forbid educational institutions from distributing the "free" version, you're punishing the Goonies-tolerant organizations for Goonies-intolerance. Not to mention the need to define what "educational institution" means.

Being concerned about preventing others from making money off this ("If we struggle to make it free, you can’t be paid") seems to also run counter to the stated reason for making it free in the first place ("We will make money from creating great stories, not selling overpriced niche software.").

There's also the problem of longevity. If Wonder Unit, Inc. goes belly-up, then its non-FOSS storyboard editor does, too. An actually-FOSS license means there's at least some chance of the broader FOSS community keeping it alive, if only so that they can say "well hang on, Linux has awesome creative/multimedia tools, too - and we don't even have to pretend GIMP is one of them anymore".

All that said, the MIT license is probably not the right fit for Storyboarder itself (but is certainly a good fit for the underlying libraries; same with the ISC license) based on your criteria. A strict copyleft license - like the GNU GPL - might actually be more up your alley, since it would force anyone hoping to make a buck off your hard work to release their source code and allow others (you included) to do the same and make a buck off their hard work. If they don't comply, sue 'em.

Of course, even that one educator's little stunt of cloning your repo and removing all references to Wonder Unit would run afoul of both the MIT and ISC licenses, so you'd still be covered if you took the legal approach to going medieval on his Goonies-intolerant ass.

All in all, it doesn't really matter to me (as a Linux-using end user) what license you opt to use for Storyboarder (I use plenty of non-free software day-to-day), as long as there actually is a license so that I know whether or not I'm legally allowed to even use the software (let alone redistribute it, modify it, package it up for a Linux distro's package manager/repositories, etc.).

Even with all that aside, though, Storyboarder looks like an amazing tool, and the fact that it works on something that's not running Windows or macOS is a pretty damn big deal. Kudos, and thanks for your hard work. Whatever the license ends up being, it'll be a valuable contribution in that particular niche of "storyboarders who want to use Linux".

Which implies all rights are reserved and no one may reproduce, distribute, or create derivative works from the work, which is clearly what the developer wants.

He even took the time to let developers know they assign all rights to Wonder Unit when the contribute with a CLA: https://cla-assistant.io/wonderunit/storyboarder

There was a license field in package.json, but the author claims it was generated automatically and thus does not stand as an explicit license:

https://github.com/wonderunit/storyboarder/blob/25a82cc20b01...

I also like archive to or archive is

You can archive things on demand.

https://archive.fo/PAL3t

I admire your optimism, but I just can't share it.

That licensing rant ends with the line "And it will only cost $30 per seat." (for and education-specific version) while also specifying a plan that would prohibit distribution either by or to education institutions.

I really don't have a problem with commercial software. But schemes like this, trying to get the best of both worlds and in the process undermining the meaning of Free Software always strike me as both destructive and pathetic.

It's not even that hard to properly execute a dual-licensing scheme: they could license the code under GPL, which would make it hard to impossible for others to commercialise. Then, they could offer a commercial license to educational institutions, and would be the only ones allowed to charge for such a version.

But the tone of that blog post makes me think there's more that's wrong with this project than just their licensing.

Right, and even a cursory search would reveal that for license violations, you can file a DMCA takedown request with Github against the offending repository [0]. It literally takes ten minutes and Github is required by law to act immediately and ask questions later. And then at that point, the ball's in the other guy's court. He could file a DMCA Counter Notice with Github to get the repository reinstated, but in doing so, he is swearing under penalty of perjury that he is telling the truth claiming that he didn't violate the original code's license. If the forker didn't credit Wonder Unit as required by their original license [1], well, then clearly Wonder Unit has a case to have the code removed. This isn't Vietnam. There are rules.

[0] https://help.github.com/articles/dmca-takedown-policy/

[1] https://choosealicense.com/licenses/mit/

@setpixel, your behaviour is very unpleasing and clearly violates the most important principle of hackernews: civility.

"Since long before the web, the anonymity of online conversation has lured people into being much ruder than they'd be in person. So the principle here is: don't say anything you wouldn't say face to face. This doesn't mean you can't disagree. But disagree without calling names. If you're right, your argument will be more convincing without them."

You can find the rest of the site guidelines here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

Wow, this guy is being shockingly immature. He honestly writes like my friends and I did when we were young teenagers. This is disappointing for HN.

Wow, what a jerk. Didn't downvote him either. Not sure why he would be so seemingly angry. I just made an observation.

Clearly he has a vendetta against key people in the industry and wishes to call them out with school-yard bully insults.

There was the weird thing with the cat, and then this, and it really turned me off from downloading.

just email me: charles@setpixel.com - its not even close to done yet tho

It's breaks really bad on mobile though. Seems to be a very well thought out product from the little I could see.

But again, to be clear, it's not free software according to the commonly accepted definition of free software.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

I like how you include that. It makes the page different than the usual sanitized PR/marketing speak that is common. However, I don't know much about Morin and Vaynerchuk. What's are some of the annoying things about them?

I was caught off guard, but it was pretty hilarious.

I just realized you have a very old hackernews account. You must've been one of the first people to register.

No Michael Bay?

I'm not surprised. I'm not really in that biz, so it's just really cool to me that such a thing exists. I love coming across applications of tech that, to us engineers, are pretty simple but to the user are game changing.

Some do, some don't. Increasing numbers of them have touchscreens though. Also, some of them have access to the Android Play store, so if it can be packaged as an Android app, that might also work. I don't know what sort of API's chromebooks have for pens though.

Alternately as a web-app, but again, not sure what APIs you have access to - I recall there being a stylus web-api about 10 years ago, created by wacom, but it died.

Many do but not all (I have a Samsung which does and an Acer which doesn't).

Nice! FWIW I think Procreate does a really great job of striking the right balance between options/flexibility and simplicity.

You're not alone in your sentiment. There are a few posts around here that do not "feel" like a typical Hacker News post. So my astro-turfing alarms are going off.

Granted, this looks like a good tool (at minimum: a very good marketing page), and the practice of astroturfing is unfortunately utilitarian (aka: it works ) in many contexts. But there's something offputting about some of the comments on this story right now.

With that being said: I'm not entirely sure if this tool is best suited for the hacker news audience? Its definitely more of an art tool, while the audience around here is more programmer / technical.

I'm getting this problem from my work network, but works fine from my 4G connection.