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Comment by metaphor | Hacker News Reader

From their About page[1]:

> In principle Rascal is a research laboratory and research vehicle that is not intended for production use (yet).

No offense and nothing personal, but the following remark struck me as rather entitled and self-serving to your commercial interests:

> But they could make that fact clearer. (Also, I haven't actually checked every single source file, so there is some risk some of them might be under different license terms.)

This perspective may be slightly biased with recent personal experiences in dealing with an aquisition team who habitually tries to weasel its way into having its cake and eating it too.

[1] https://www.rascal-mpl.org/about/

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> No offense and nothing personal, but the following remark struck me as rather entitled and self-serving to your commercial interests:

I have no commercial interests here. I have no plans on using this software commercially (in fact, I have no plans on using this software at all.) I don't want to speak for my employer, but I'm not aware of any plans to use this software at my place of work, and I personally have no plans to propose that they do.

Why do I speak up about it then? Simply because I think clarity in open-source licensing is important.

> Why do I speak up about it then? Simply because I think clarity in open-source licensing is important.

Fair enough and thanks for clarifying.

To be sure, using the term "risk" in the context of licensing speaks quite clearly in my mind of interests aligned with commercialization (or the prohibition thereof).

> To be sure, using the term "risk" in the context of licensing speaks quite clearly in my mind of interests aligned with commercialization (or the prohibition thereof).

In principle at least, unclear licensing is a legal risk even to non-commercial users. If someone posts stuff on GitHub without any clear license, and I then fork it and makes some modifications as part of some non-commercial hobby project, and then the author of the original project sends a DMCA takedown notice against my non-commercial hobby fork, then legally I would not be in a very strong position. (Of course, in practice, this is unlikely to happen very often, but I suspect something like this probably does on rare occasion.)

> ...and I then fork it and makes some modifications as part of some non-commercial hobby project, and then the author of the original project sends a DMCA takedown notice against my non-commercial hobby fork, then legally I would not be in a very strong position.

In agreement with the pragmatic implications, but I still genuinely struggle to see the point. The financial constraints of legal defense is what strikes me as the killer of non-commercial hobby projects if the hypothetical scenario would arise; with or without appropriate licensing terms, there's really nothing to stop an original project with the financial means and intent from issuing a DMCA takedown and outspending an unfunded project in legal maneuvering. IANAL but at least it sure does feel that way in my limited experience.

IANAL either, but launching totally bogus lawsuits, without a shred of justification, in the hope of overwhelming defendants without the financial resources to defend them, is a legally risky strategy – there is a risk of disbarment, or even criminal prosecution, for lawyers who engage in such behaviour (see the Prenda Law case). A lawyer can get away with making flimsy arguments, but a lawyer who knowingly makes arguments totally ungrounded in law or fact is risking their own career.

I'm with skissane, I'd be leery of any project without clear licensing as well... regardless of whether or not I had any kind of commercial interest in the project. To me, it's just one of Those Things That Should Be There, ya know? If the license terms aren't clear, I don't really know what I'm allowed to do, or not, with the project, and that just makes me uncomfortable.

But, I'm a bit of a radical ideologue when it comes to F/OSS, so maybe I'm a bit outside the mainstream on this one.

> ...I don't really know what I'm allowed to do, or not, with the project, and that just makes me uncomfortable.

If your interests weren't somehow commercially aligned--be it directly or indirectly--why would it really matter? Perhaps I'm the real radical here who still parades around with a false sense of hacker ethos.

I don't see how commercial interests even factor into this at all. If somebody puts a project out there, and I'm tempted to invest time/energy/attention into studying it, learning it, maybe building stuff with or, or possibly even contributing to it, then I want to know that it's really open-source. If it's not, then it's probably not worth my time/energy/attention because I have an ideological aversion to proprietary software.

As a counterexample to your point, consider RMS: he cares a lot about the details of software licensing, but most people would consider him a "real radical" with lots of old school "hacker ethos" and few would call him "commercially aligned"

> To be sure, using the term "risk" in the context of licensing speaks quite clearly in my mind of interests aligned with commercialization (or the prohibition thereof).

There are other risks, like the risk of wasting time learning something that will one day be very expensive and proprietary, will disappear completely, etc.

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