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Comment by gpas | Hacker News Reader

From the explaining blog post [0]

> If you’re not interested in how it works and you just want to do monkey patching, then you can find the library here.

Also

> Wrapping it up in a nice library

> I took the above code and put it in an easy to use library. It supports 32 bit, reversing patches, and patching instance methods. I wrote a couple of examples and put those in the README.

Then in the README[1]:

> Make sure you read the notes at the bottom of the README if you intend to use this library.

Either the author is confused or has decided that he doesn't want to maintain an hack. Anyway license is pretty clear.

There was an HN thread[2] when it was released.

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

[1] https://github.com/bouk/monkey

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9290917

View on HN

The author is not confused, it's like an actually enforcable version of "use it at your own risk" because it includes legal risk. It's clever and funny

Gonna have to disagree that it's funny.

Why not? Do you feel entitled to a warranty?

I just don't think "here's a neat thing... tee-hee you can't use it!" Is funny. I don't know if "neener neener" was ever funny to me, even as a child. I understand that it's important to you to bandy about "subtle" accusations by using words like "entitle" so you can feel like you have a point, but there's nothing more there. If I felt entitled I would just ignore the license and use the code anyway.

I have no idea what you’re talking about.

I have a hard time believing that the word "entitle" was accompanied by no judgement, but if not, then I apologize for making assumptions. I find feelings of entitlement to be largely the result of selfishness or delusion, and so when I hear it applied to me, that's what I think is being said.

It's satirical

Have you checked how many projects depend on Monkey? It seems the blog post has been translated and reposted many times. Satire does not translate well.

It crossed my mind...

Thanks for chiming in and clear the misunderstanding.

It seems that you're not interested in suing anyone over this. However, you still don't give people permission to use, not even in small throwaway tests. Which is fair.

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/

Pretty funny right?

Not in the slightest, but I guess that’s your kick.

Has anyone ever tested in court whether a license has to be made in good faith to be binding?

Well, if it isn't binding, then there's no right to reuse it (beyond certain fair use exceptions) under the copyright law that applies by default.

For me the question is whether the misleading blog post would be found by a court to be an implicit license separate from the one in the codebase. My guess is that it would depend on several factors including the specific circumstances of the accused infringer and the specifics of contract/copyright law in the relevant jurisdiction, but probably at least sometimes yes.

TIL something can be implicitly licensed. Well the term is implied license https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implied_license

An open source licence generally only gives additional rights. If it's not binding, then default copyright would apply, meaning you're still not allowed to use it.

No, don't screw around with people legally. It makes you look dishonest.

How is he screwing around with anyone legally? Has anyone been sued over this? Most of this stuff is unenforceable in any meaningful way. Worst case is really some nasty emails.

He does not look dishonest. He looks like the hero we all deserve. Dial it back a bit, would you?

I think his satire is excellent. Look at how these silly licenses are simultaneously taken very serious and frankly not taken seriously at all. I think he has proven something really quite interesting, and in a pretty amusing way.

I found it really funny!

Yes, I had a chortle, particularly at the reactions in this thread. :D

Though I'm an anarchist who thinks people give the law as written far too much weight. (As opposed to what the population as a whole thinks is good or bad)

Not really. The JSLint license is funny because objecting to the "The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil." requirement looks like an admission of malintent. Doubly funny that it compelled IBM to ask for explicit permission to use JSLint for evil.

Your project, on the other hand, just looks like it was designed to waste people's time. Congrats I guess?

I think so. There is also second-order funnyness from all of the very serious nerds who don't find it funny at all. I'm loving it ahah!

I mean you trolled a lot of devs and they are now salty over this silly thing and uhmm I think it's my poor sense of humor but I don't usually find practical jokes that funny.

Satire doesn't work very well on the internet in textual context. That's why emoticons were invented.

What is it satirizing?

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

Regardless, its your code, do what you want.

Ding ding ding. There is no satire to be found here.

You can also check the revision dates and see that the license was updated a year after the readme, which would imply any encouraging language in the readme is simply out of date.

Presumably revision 697673d58359af7ebdcad66f99b81d011359d8ef and earlier is perfectly fine to use, lacking a LICENSE.txt and with the README encouraging use

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

That said,

> If you publish your source code in a public repository on GitHub, according to the Terms of Service, other users of GitHub have the right to view and fork your repository.

https://docs.github.com/en/github/creating-cloning-and-archi...

The actual term (D.5 from https://docs.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-terms-o... )

> 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.

This allows you to browse and use the fork button to create a repository. It's unclear if the second paragraph is clarifying, or adding to the first term. If it's additive, then you might also have permission to host your own private repo off service.

Nowhere does it give you a license to _use_ the contents of the repository in your software. Nor does it allow you to publish the contents outside github - the first paragraph does not address publishing, and the second makes it clear that paragraph only applies "through Github's functionality".

> Nowhere does it give you a license to _use_ the contents of the repository in your software. Nor does it allow you to publish the contents outside github

To clarify, I did not mean to say that it does; I merely wanted to make people aware of the fact that some "default" restrictions are lifted when you publish on GitHub (just like when I type this comment on HN).

You're granting GitHub the right to display your content to other users, and to make additional copies of it ("forks"). Those seem like reasonable rights to assign to Github when agreeing to their terms of service. I think it's completely clear that putting "all rights reserved" doesn't allow you to opt out of certain parts of the ToS, any more than the "I do not allow Facebook to use my content..." pseudo-legalese borderline-sovereign-citizen nonsense that goes viral every time Facebook change their privacy policy.

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