Show HN: Tinkersynth 2.0 (now with color and open-sourced)
joshwcomeau.com
joshwcomeau.com
Absolutely appreciate the effort you put into making this, and very grateful that you’ve open sourced it.
When I read the text quoted above my takeaway was that the intention is that people should still be able to use the outputs in their own work. However, as I understand copyright law, the copyright of a work also applies to derivatives of it such that permission is required (either directly or through a license for the work) to make use of the derivative works in ways extending beyond any initially agreed upon use.
Fortunately, you’ve got that bit covered in the details about the license.
> If you use Tinkersynth as input to your creative process, and the output is so different that it would be unrecognizeable as a Tinkersynth design, please feel free to use it commercially, or however you wish. The art is 100% yours at that point. I'm not sure if this is technically within the bounds of the license (I just picked the closest representation of what I want I could find), but please feel free to contact me and I'll grant a personal exemption after seeing the work.
To play devils advocate it might be difficult to say what would qualify as “unrecognizable as a Tinkersynth design” though.
From the point of view of most of your users I think it will turn out to be a non-issue.
I do think however that there is some potential that some users might interpret what it means to be “unrecognizable” differently from what you do, and so there is a risk of future disputes between you and some users. Hopefully there won’t be of course. I am not a lawyer, by the way. Just offering my thoughts on this.
Secondly, however, and more importantly, I wonder to what extent it is actually possible for the author of a tool to claim copyright on the output of a tool if said tool has sufficient amount of randomness or user input controlling the output. I don’t have an answer to this, and I don’t know if it would apply to your tool. But I think it might be worth looking into, just to ensure that the restrictions you are putting on the output of your tool are actually possible to put there.
(And again, IANAL, TINLA.)
The thing I don’t want is people inverting the colors, or cropping it, and calling it a unique work. I’ve already had people trying to sell Tinkersynth works they hadn’t paid for in the old model, and I’ve heard some horror stories from other creative coders.
As to whether it’s possible to copyright the output of a tool... that’s a good question! I’m not actually sure either. I don’t expect any real issues to emerge. The licence change is largely around guarding the most obvious cases, I won’t even try to make a fuss in any other cases.
> License
This code is released without license. I hope that you'll read the source to answer any questions you have and take that knowledge to your own projects, rather than forking and augmenting Tinkersynth itself.
(Of course you're more than welcome to try modifying the code for your own curiosity! Just please don't publish it, or try to monetize it).
As for “not really open-source”, you’re right. I’m clearer in the FAQ on tinkersynth.com; it’s not “OSS” in the conventional sense. I just didn’t know how else to phrase it in the limited HN title.