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Comment by ent101 | Hacker News Reader

I'm a co-creator of Outpan. You are correct that there are lots of open source projects on Outpan, because we offer financial incentives for people to host apps on Outpan (the incentive is similar to Youtube).

That said, there are also many proprietary apps and games on Outpan too and if an app is posted by someone who doesn't have the rights to do so, it is removed and the user is banned; then again with open source, as long as the license is valid and the terms followed properly, we can't really remove them. In the case of this particular app, it was under MIT license as mentioned in the about section. I understand that the 'About' section of the app may not be super clear causing confusion, we'll try to make it more visible.

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That very elegantly sidesteps the question: is this app uploaded by you or by the original author or by someone else entirely?

It was uploaded by someone else entirely, but we did check to make sure the license is valid.

Don't you find it odd - to say the least - that you would offer to financially reward someone who did not author the project?

Not really, since the original software is released under an open source license, in this case the MIT license which allows for monetization as long as the terms are followed. If the poster hadn't followed the terms we wouldn't be ok with it.

This is common on mobile app stores too: for example there are many variations of the ZXing barcode app which all follow the terms of the open source license, some are even paid apps.

Another example would be cloud services offering commercial products based on mysql, redis, elastic...

Who is to say the poster isn't you, after all you are submitting the link here too to draw traffic to it. I don't like the smell of this even if it may be following the letter of the law. You are essentially monetizing other people's work without even notifying the original authors so they can claim their own work.

Your beef is with open source licenses.

It's really not.

As a community, do we want to be sending eyeballs to the original source, or a monetized copy?

OP is free to do what he or she is doing, we are free to block it as spam or link to the original source.

I don't know man... I tend to agree with @recursive here. I think some of you guys aren't treating the poster fairly.

I can see why this would get some people fired up. It definitely feels a little gross presented in this manner. But... it IS MIT liscense. Nobody made the author release it this way.

He could have easily released the demo on his own website and not provided the code "without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies".

I'm glad people pointed out the original author, I just went and browsed his codepen page. But we have to assume he is OK with people coyping or even selling the code assuming the license is not breached.

I'm not complaining about the existence of Outpan, or trying to mount some defense of the original author.

I'm saying that links to this kind of aggregator have no place on Hacker News. What benefit is it to the community to have the authorship hidden and ads added?

Talking about licensing is orthogonal to my point. Blogspam is totally legal and not accepted here. This is no different.

> But we have to assume he is OK with people coyping or even selling the code assuming the license is not breached.

https://twitter.com/jake_albaugh/status/1195535720640856065

I agree the site should be banned.

You're not breaking any contracts or laws, but posting a clone of a previously discussed project with ads tacked on by a third party is worthless spam. I flagged the link and I suggest others do the same.

Not the first spam, one of which was even titled Show HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=ent101

I didn't know this project was posted before; that's my fault and I apologize for it. I have contacted the mods to remove the post if they feel so. That said, I have never tried to spam HN, just posted links from our site which I thought the community might like, I'm sorry if it came across as spammy.

Funnily enough, you said the exact same thing the last time you were called out for it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21108977, but apparently didn't feel the need to stop posting such submissions?

Sneaky... good find.

Definitely cheeky. All work on CodePen is by default MIT. Looking at the first demo on the homepage, the act name is “cpmirror”, so fair to say people looking to jump on making money from others work is a big incentive... but also, what’s new I guess :(

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