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Comment by itdaniher | Hacker News Reader

...as risky as installing a proprietary editor plugin which updates automatically, yes.

Also, AFAIK most understandings of MIT, BSD, and Apache 2.0 licenses require you to acknowledge the copyright holders of the source code you compile into your binary, even if the licenses permit binary distribution. I can't find your "Copyright (c) 2018 Tokio Contributors" or "Copyright (c) 2014 The Rust Project Developers" that I'd expect based on `strings TabNine | grep github`. Maybe you've got a lawyer that suggests otherwise? Your plea of "trust me, I have good hygiene" carries less weight when I have to `strings` your stuff to know what shoulders of which giants you're standing on.

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> ...as risky as installing a proprietary editor plugin which updates automatically, yes.

Can't you make the same complaint about any auto-update functionality in any software? Even if it's BSD licensed, you're still counting on whomever has authority to push an update to not push malicious code.

This doesn't seem to have anything to do with the fact that his code is proprietary nor his monetisation strategy, so why are you singling him out for those?

Proprietary - Can't patch out the autoupdate, which I might be tempted to do if something else in my toolchain did things at someone else's leisure.

DRM/monetisation - the product as of my comment didn't seem to acknowledge the open source works compiled into the binary, and I didn't think that was a good look for someone with the authority to push out malicious code.

As risky as ones that don't update automatically either. Just because a plugin doesn't update automatically doesn't mean it doesn't still have the capability of doing network access. Unless you're actually sandboxing all your IDE plugins and denying most of them network access (and verifying on every new IDE plugin you install whether it's allowed network access), but I don't believe that's how IDE plugins generally work.

MIT only requires source attribution. It's the BSD licenses that require attribution for binary forms of redistribution. Still, it is good manners and good cover-your-arse practice to attribute whatever free software work they used (Google does this with their giant "open source licenses" page).

MIT has no special language regarding source or binary distribution, it simply states:

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

It's up to a court to decide what "copies or substantial portions of the Software" means.

Personally, I've always very much interpreted that to mean both binary and source.

Well, you could argue that the notice is "present" (in a very esoteric sense) in a binary distribution of the software because it was present in the source code used to build it. You could also argue that a compiled version of a program isn't a "copy or substantial portion" of the Software (compilation is effectively a form of translation, which is a derivative work under the Copyright Act in the US -- and not just a copy).

Personally I would still include it in both, but I always had the impression that MIT was looser than BSD-2-Clause about this. BSD-2-Clause explicitly states that binary distribution needs to include the notice in "the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution", and I have a feeling that the license authors might've had a reason to want to be explicit about it.

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