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Comment by gkoberger | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. I've never thought of pre-built CLI commands as something that would be licensable. I'm not sure why; it's not particularly different than an NPM module or something, I suppose. I can't put my finger on it, but it feels super weird to me.

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Because with a programming language, you can learn how something works and implement it yourself without copying the implementation. Your implementation will have a similar underlying algorithm but enough differences that it wouldn't be a copy. Algorithm (that is probably not copyrightable) and implementation (that is) are separate. You can use the implementation or you can learn the algorithm and implement it yourself.

With CLI tools, however, there is only one way of doing most things. There is no OOP vs functional, no loop vs comprehension, no choice of data structure, nothing. So commands being copyrightable implies no one can do certain actions with the CLI without a license. Because the only way to do those actions are with the exact command that was copyrighted.

So that means once you do something in a CLI tool, and copyright it, it's game over for everyone else using said tool? I understand what you're saying but I'm not sure that tracks, technically you could argue that the tool's license also include every combination of parameters used since the authors implemented them

But if a command language is turing complete, or some subset of it, then I guess there is more than one way of doing something and the copyright is a fair game, you can always reimplement it

> So that means once you do something in a CLI tool, and copyright it, it's game over for everyone else using said tool?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design.

Works in the case of copyright. Not patent though.

Any one can add a licence file to anything, doesn’t mean it’s enforceable, right or moral

> With CLI tools, however, there is only one way of doing most things.

These aren't simple commands, but programs written in bash, with multiple ways to implement them, and thus clearly copyrightable.

But couldn't using the script to learning the algorithm and write a commercial version also be a type of commercial use? I think we can never be too sure of anything when it comes to this lawyer stuff.

Patently wrong. Have you ever heard of the GNU operating system that avoided copywrite with a clean room rewrite of old unix tools? There's also the busybox coreutils on GPLv2 instead of v3.

It is a silly license. And in no way enforceable.

He is trying to license making a mandelbrot fractal...

"reprogram them in another scripting language"

Now that I have looked at his page I can never make another mandelbrot in Python again.

I get what he is trying to stop but the language is silly.

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