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Comment by samtho | Hacker News Reader

> For a SaaS app, wouldn't that copyright attribution be on the server side (hidden to the end user)?

I agree and my take on this is based on the way compilers generate binaries. I would not expect a compiler to inject random copyright notices in sdtout, for example. Ghost, in this case, is acting like "compiler" and the HTML can be thought of as the "output" akin to a binary generated by a traditional compiler. The MIT license (and similarly permissive ones) do not dictate software usage and thus it's output is not required to have any attribution, only source code.

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Hey, Substack CTO here. We're actually not using Ghost's platform and have instead built a theming API that is compatible with third-party themes that are built for Ghost. The one piece of code that the theme uses that's developed by Ghost is the open source search library used on the frontend. In this case the theme links directly to the files that Ghost has distributed on jsdelivr via npm

Ah you may find it interesting, the GPL3 license actually does prescribe showing copyright notices in stdout [1].

> If the program does terminal interaction, make it output a short notice like this when it starts in an interactive mode ...

> The hypothetical commands `show w' and `show c' should show the appropriate parts of the General Public License. Of course, your program's commands might be different; for a GUI interface, you would use an “about box”.

This is to say it is not entire unusual to have copyright notices in output.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html

This feels silly. Not a single one of my userland tools does this, but they are clearly all GNU...

Note the “interactive mode” - this means like starting an editor or nslookup kind of thing.

Less is interactive, and does no such thing.

I mean, I get it. This will be nigh impossible to codify, such that there will be reasons things can and cannot work in certain situations. This line of attack here, though, is feeling overly forced and would actually sway me to never use such licensed stuff. And I'm pretty heavy on the open source support.

Yeah it's clearly a "recommendation" and people seem to use it pretty sanely.

bash doesn't do it even if you start a subshell. I know I've seen the NO WARRANTY message flash on my screen but darned if I can find a gnu program that does it by default.

Bear in mind these are suggestions, not part of the terms and conditions of the license itself.

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