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Comment by vngzs | Hacker News Reader

Please don't use this license. Copy the language from the preamble and put it in your README if you'd like, but the permissions granted are so severely restricted as to make this license essentially useless for anything besides "validation of scientific claims." It's not an open-source license - if someone wished to include code from CRAPL in their MIT-licensed program, the license does not grant them the permission to do so. Nor does it grant permission for "general use" - the software might not be legally "suitable for any purpose," but it should be the user's choice to decide if they want to use the software for something that isn't validation of scientific claims.

I am not a lawyer, just a hardcore open-source advocate in a former life.

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I‘m a proponent of MIT and BSD style licenses normally, but this calls for something like AGPL: Allow other researchers and engineers to improve upon your code and build amazing things with it. If someone wants to use your work to earn money, let them understand and reimplement the algorithms and concepts, that’s fine too.

That's probably not viable under US copyright law, especially with the Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music precedent; if someone is going to reimplement the algorithms and concepts without a copyright license, they're better off not reading your code so they don't have to prove in court, to a computer-illiterate jury, that the aspects their code had in common with your code were really purely functional and not creative.

Yeah, this seems a bit verbose and overbearing to me. The open-source licenses I've used myself include something like this, which seems quite sufficient:

> THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

From a non-academic's point of view I might include a brief disclaimer in the README too, explaining the context for the code and why it's in the state it's in, but there's no obligation to hold the user's hand. To be frank, anybody nitpicking or criticizing code released under these circumstances with the expectation that the author do something about it can go fuck themselves.

Competitive advantage, on the other hand, is a perfectly valid reason to hold code back. There may also be some cost in academia to opening an attack surface for any sort of criticism, even irrelevant criticism made in obvious bad faith. Based on what I've heard about academia, this wouldn't surprise me.

From the post: "The CRAPL says nothing about copyright ownership or permission to commercialize. You'll have to attach another license if you want to classically open source your software."

It is explicitly the point of the license that the code is not for those purposes, because it's shitty code that should not be reused in any real code base.

That's not a good excuse for putting your readers at legal risk of copyright infringement. A real, non-shitty code base could easily be a "derivative work" of the shitty code.

In the research industry, it is well established for anyone wanting to publish or utilize / include another's research in their own, to contact the source author and receive explicit permission to do so.

More often than not, they are more than willing to help.

"Well-established" norms are a barrier to newcomers and perpetuate power structures (including racial, ethnic, national, and socio-economic).

That's not theoretical; I know many people who were or would be embarrassed to ask.

Explicitly posting things is helpful.

It looks quite explicitly designed as a short-term temporary license for the period when the main paper is unpublished and you'd be expected to keep the code non-public (due to e.g. reviewing anonymity requirements), so the basic open source freedoms are explicitly not included.

I would expect that anyone wanting to actually publish their code should publish the code with a "proper" license after the reviewing process is done and the relevant paper is published.

> the permissions granted are so severely restricted as to make this license essentially useless

Indeed, also there're things like "By reading this sentence, You have agreed to the terms and conditions of this License.". That can't hold up in court! How can I know in advance what the rest of the conditions say before agreeing to them?

Then again, I am not a lawyer either.

While I whole heatedly agree with you, I would seriously question anyone trying to reuse research code in production without completely reimplementing it from scratch.

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