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Comment by metadat | Hacker News Reader

> is it some kind of a tease

(I am the author). It's definitely not a tease. The license will change within a week (max 2). This is my first open source project. The purpose is to validate the approach.

This has been a private project for a very long time. It can be argued that I should have figured out the license but the delay from my side reached a tipping point. I just thought "make it public, figure the rest later".

Got it, if you're open to feedback: in the future, a few more words of explanation about the reasoning in the readme will be appreciated by folks and go a long way in making it clear you are reasonable and thoughtful person. Otherwise it's up to the reader to guess what kind of individual sits on the other side of the screen.

Unfortunately there is a lot of code license drama these days compared to a decade ago. For reference, see the Elasticsearch OSS License renege fiasco from January 2021.

https://www.infoq.com/news/2021/01/elastic-aws-open-source/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elasticsearch#Licensing_change...

Keep up the good work!

Isn't "...and to my knowledge it is very restrictive. This will change." enough of an explanation?

Noted.

I have changed the license to MIT.

Should we avoid even reading this code if there is no license? Its currently proprietary code?

I think you can read the code. I knowingly made the repo public. You do not even have to login to github. I think it should be ok.

It's just a matter of legalities. Even if you share it openly, it doesn't change its copyright status. Unless you offer a licence or make a statement putting it in the public domain (this doesn't work in all jurisdictions), it remains proprietary.

Of course that doesn't matter too much because you're not going to sue people who use it, but it can still have potentially significant consequences for people who use the code.

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