Project includes a dependancy that has a license that forbids its use

If you do personal projects that are open source it's equally important to know what licenses your dependencies have if you release those projects to the public.

I would describe an end user count, revenue size, etc in order to apply special circumstances to corporations. Drone.io does a great job of this.

Non-free licensed code has been on GitHub for quite some time. It's not only about free software and you should not assume so, as in all software.

Edit: changed FOSS to "free"

It would be an interesting precedent, forcing companies to comply with everything their advertisements say and doing away with any sort of fine print and ToS. I’m all for it, in fact. Total Ankh-Morporkization!

the library is currently in use by Heroku/SalesForce to build deploy java apps (or something like that) https://github.com/heroku/java-buildpack/blob/master/go.mod

I wonder what sort of settlement you could get if you were to send them a lawyer for real.

(We fleshbags could probably use more widespread application and understanding of formal language and notation as well—the most cumbersome description of linear interpolation I’ve ever seen was in the section on a real estate tax hike in the tax code; it had paragraphs! I mean, I feel for those who didn’t have a good time in high-school algebra, but I don’t see how they could reasonably deal with that monstrosity either.)

In this case the license was silly, but if this library had been GPL, it’d still have been a massive violation by most of those big companies, and that’s something we need to pay more attention to.

If someone spends the time to integrate mystery code without taking the time to check the license allows it then frankly they dug that hole themselves.

Thanks for chiming in and clear the misunderstanding.

But your blog post[0] language suggests that you are okay with and even incentivizes people trying this out (even if trying it out might be technically illegal, because it infringes your rights).

I think you should have mentioned something about the license in your blog post. As it stands, "If you’re not interested in how it works and you just want to do monkey patching, then you can find the library here." is misleading. If the user wants to do monkey patching, they better not look at your code and program their own solution.

[0] https://bou.ke/blog/monkey-patching-in-go/

Or is this just a post-hoc "its just a joke bro. Y u mad?"

Regardless, its your code, do what you want.

https://choosealicense.com/no-permission/

> … which is exactly dow it is used in dapr

Eh... There's a difference between "a testing environment" as used in that quote and "as part of an automated test" as you mean here.

To me the former implies an experimental and/or ad-hoc environment, while the latter implies a stable, production environment.

It only needs some build-in YouTube and Getty-Images browser to select fairuseify targets. (It should work for all kind of media, of course).

I think we've solved the copyright issue right now finally for good, didn't we?

Actually it does matter and you don't have to. In practice pet projects are basically never going to be sued, it's simply not worth it. As a side note, a lot of techy people struggle to separate the law as written with the law as practiced.

The ethics question is more interesting, but for something like this which is clearly satirical? No harm, no foul.

I still wouldn’t use this code, because I don’t want to break the law. Being anti-copyright doesn’t mean you also need to be against due process.

> 5. License Grant to Other Users

> Any User-Generated Content you post publicly, including issues, comments, and contributions to other Users' repositories, may be viewed by others. By setting your repositories to be viewed publicly, you agree to allow others to view and "fork" your repositories (this means that others may make their own copies of Content from your repositories in repositories they control).

> If you set your pages and repositories to be viewed publicly, you grant each User of GitHub a nonexclusive, worldwide license to use, display, and perform Your Content through the GitHub Service and to reproduce Your Content solely on GitHub as permitted through GitHub's functionality (for example, through forking). You may grant further rights if you adopt a license. If you are uploading Content you did not create or own, you are responsible for ensuring that the Content you upload is licensed under terms that grant these permissions to other GitHub Users

But my point wasn't about transitive deps (directly). The point is about pulling something new into your project.

At the point you include something that something needs to tell you the license for itself and for all its dependencies. If it doesn't that's already fishy in its own rights (and you should turn back or start investigating for real). You need to look at the provided license lists of course.

Yes, I see more and more projects that don't list licenses for their deps. But that's usually already a license volition on its own! You can't use something like that, it's obviously problematic.

Having some tools that download random stuff form the internet may be OK when you're doing something for yourself. But at the moment you want to publish that something you're obligated to check the licenses. That's a know thing. If you don't that's very shoddy work, and actually you could get sued for all resulting damages.

So no matter what it's actually impossible to include code with a problematic license, given no botchers were involved anywhere deeper in the chain.

And here we're at the core of what I've said:

It's completely baffling to me how something like that could possibly happen. At least as long as I try to believe that no complete idiots work in the industry, people who aren't even capable of reading, and don't know even the most basic things about the job they try to do. People that therefore shouldn't be allowed to touch anything as they could create great danger for their surroundings and for themself!

But OK, maybe I just have to accept that the software industry is not different to this here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfyPLTIn2D8

Based on what law/authority?

Copyright law forbids making copies, derivative works, etc. Not using things. You're allowed to read a book without a license.

Moreover copyright law makes an explicit exception for the copies required to run a computer program on a machine that aren't used in other ways (i.e. copying it to ram/registers): https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/117

The author may say "you can't use this", but it is not clear to me that he has any legal authority to do so.

The question I'm addressing in 3 is whether or not the source code becomes a derivative work of the dependency (meaning writing it in the first place would be illegal). The only portion of the dependency that the source code copied was the names of a few functions/modules (part of the API). Copying that part of the API into the work seems very analagous to the Oracle/Google case, except even less was copied and it is even less of a market place competitor (but again, I'm not a lawyer).

(Again, not a lawyer, not super familiar with this part of copyright law, but...) I'd argue that the copy is made on githubs server and then sent to me, and I simply move the sole copy around (or to the extent that I make a new copy it is a lawful copy of the network traffic for archival purposes under 17 USC 117 (a) (2)). That "git clone" is clearly a integral part of githubs service so the license is clearly intended to cover it. That "git clone" is not meaningfully different from "wget" from "a web browser" - again the license is clearly intended to cover this. That any liability that does exist falls on GitHub as the party making the copy.

I'm not sure which if any of those arguments would convince a court though

That sentence is wrong, GitHub’s terms of service explicitly give users a right to download, and also run, the code of any project that is publicly visible. Please read the terms, especially section D “5. License Grant to Other Users”. https://docs.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-terms-o...