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Comment by cryptonector | Hacker News Reader

> The BSD school of hackerdom rejects intellectual property and its hassles. Ideally, BSD school hackers wouldn’t use licenses at all. [...]

Uh, no, that's not true. "The BSD school of hackerdom" doesn't reject intellectual property. What a ridiculous oversimplification.

Licensing terms are a business tool. The choice of license at any given point depends on what goals one has, and also what constraints one has. Assuming no constraints, I'd say that anything you feel you can monetize you should either keep proprietary, or use GPL for, while anything you cannot monetize should be licensed under BSD or MIT or similar. That's my take, and it's a common take for many of us who BSD license code or work on BSD licensed code.

Aside: how does one get compensated for BSD-licensing? Easy: a) other people's BSD-licensed sources, b) credit and reputation. Both are a big deal.

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The BSD school I referred to is only related to BSD license terms, not defined by them. Many BSD school hackers use MIT or ISC or even Apache. I also mention FPL (0BSD), Unlicense, and especially WTFPL as distinctively BSD-school licenses.

The ideological wing that chooses those licenses, despite knowing businesses won’t accept them, wouldn’t choose GPL for personal work. It’s not a pragmatic position. It’s an activist one.

I think the attribution requirements of BSD-style licenses can be burdensome. If you use 50 permissively licensed open source libraries in your program, you could potentially have to ship 50 different copyright notices and license texts (all with slight differences in terms or wording) in any binary distribution. A lot of boilerplate and busywork. And then remember to take them out again if you don't use that library any more, or update them if the next version changes them a bit, etc.

This is why I see Unlicense, WTFPL, CC0, etc., as appealing.

If I was to develop something that other people ended up using, I'd like to be acknowledged, and I like to think people will do it – just out of common decency, not out of legal obligation. But, I don't really want to burden people with legal obligations to reproduce oodles of copyright notices and license texts.

(Disclaimer: These are just my personal opinions, not those of my employer. I'm really talking about 'what license should I choose as a hobbyist for a personal project?', not what licenses a corporation should choose as a business strategy.)

I am not a lawyer, however I've normally seen the attribution included in the About / informational display of a program. It's entirely about giving credit that something was used and who contributed to that thing (entirely, credit where due).

IANAL either, but it isn't a mere requirement to give credit. A single sentence can be sufficient to give credit.

"Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution."

That appears to be asking for more than just a one line acknowledgement.

BSD != "advertising clause". You have to look.

I would never include an advertising clause -- I think that's a very onerous term. The projects I work on that use BSD-style licensing do not have an advertising clause.

I believe he's talking about attribution, not advertising.

Yes, I'm talking about clause 2 of the original "4-clause" BSD license. Advertising is clause 3 of the original BSD license. The newer "modified"/"3-clause" license deletes the original clause 3, but clause 2 remains unchanged.

I think you might find this post interesting, especially the "Attribution Doesn't Mean Credit" section:

https://writing.kemitchell.com/2018/08/28/Unhappy-Coincidenc...

You might also like to look at the tools that have been written for front-end JavaScript bundlers, like Browserify and Webpack, that automatically assemble and concatenate license notices. That's not a complete solution for all projects, but it shows what tools can do with workable license metadata.

https://www.npmjs.com/search?q=webpack+licenses

Are you able to explain why one needs a "no warranty" disclaimer on software you are giving away for free?

All consumer protection laws I've seen are predicated on a sale, and so I would not expect them to apply to gifts. A warranty is a contract term, an implied warranty is an implied contract term, but if someone distributes open source software without charge, there is no exchange, no consideration, no contract–so how can there be any warranties, express or implied?

You should get accountable legal advice for any specific project you may be involved in. This is not that.

Consider that at least common law countries don’t require payment to honor contracts. They require legal consideration, which can include mere promises in return. Have a look at Jacobsen v. Katzer and more recently Artifex v. Hancom. Both copyright and contract claims.

There are other interpretations. I’m not aware of any US case law on warranty claims against open source contributors. I’d expect to see it first in jurisdictions with laws limiting broad disclaimers, like Germany.

I think my comment makes it clear that I assumed (correctly) that you did not mean "only BSD", but all the similar licenses (e.g., MIT).

Your second paragraph above is unclear as to which licenses businesses won't accept, or why.

In my experience businesses do not accept:

- copyleft'ing in any code that could be integrated into proprietary code that might be distributed to customers

- advertising clauses (not all BSD licenses have these)

- or any clauses that are onerous in any way (the above two are onerous)

(I'm not addressing trademark or patent issues here, just copyright. Obviously code distributed under a friendly license but requiring non-free patent grants is generally out.)

I'm not sure what you mean by "personal work", but I get the feeling that you mean "not easy to monetize" or "impossible to monetize". Why would you use the GPL for such work? Why would anyone make significant changes to software that can't be monetized and not share alike even without being required to by a GPL-like license? I would absolutely prefer BSD (sans advertising clause) or MIT licensing for "personal work", and I would absolutely recommend it.

Many businesses blacklist FPL/0BSD, Unlicense, and especially WTFPL. Those that blacklist CC0 for software do so for patent-related reasons, and not, in my experience, because it's styled a public domain dedication. CC0 actually includes an extensive license, as fallback if dedication doesn't work.

When I wrote "personal work", I meant work for which the developer has control of licensing. Not code for an employer or client with their own licensing policy.

So, I'm curious why the downvotes. Is it GPL fans (even though I'm not against using the GPL)? Or something else? I want to know because this is an important subject to me.

Ignore HN points. Especially for subjects that matter to you!

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