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Comment by OJFord | Hacker News Reader

I'm not going to go looking for them, but the impression I get of the sort of copycatters described is that they really won't care what the licence is, if the source is available they'll be there anyway - the blog post will just be complaining that it's against the terms of the licence (and probably not pursuing legal action) instead.

I don't think it really matters. These things will exist, anyone who matters will realise they're not legit. They won't make significant sales (without significant added value) it won't detract from your reputation; etc.

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In fact, they already don't care. MIT requires attribution, and the author mentions in the article that "With noted exception, they don't credit me as the author or provide any sort of link back."

MIT doesn't require public attribution on the user's website. Here's what it requires:

> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

If you leave the MIT license anywhere in your server alongside the licensed code, with no public access, you are complying.

IANAL, but that doesn't sound right. A "copy" would be internet visible code repository. If it doesn't contain the LICENSE file (assuming that's what OP has) it's in violation of that rule in my opinion.

Your rationale makes sense if the software is distributed. Providing an output (observe that an output is not the software) through the internet is not considered distribution of the software.

The license doesn't require anyone to provide a copy of the license and attribution along with the output, only when the software is distributed.

Yeah that's my point, they're doing it because they can (literally can, as in the source is available) not because the licence allows them to.

If they were actually violating the license, it'd be pretty easy and cheap to send DMCA takedowns to search engines, wouldn't it? (And possibly also whoever's hosting the copycat pages.)

It looks they are not violating anything though.

That's why he is regretting the use of the MIT license. He wonders, now, if having chosen a less permissive license would have given him grounds to shut them down, because they would be in violation.

Hang on - permissive licenses still require attribution. If they're not doing that, then he can absolutely DCMA them.

(I think; IANAL)

Not on the rendered web site, only in source code

I get your point, but i guess it’s sadder to see people complying with the license terms in an assholish manner than see people completely breaching the terms of the license.

But I suppose I'm saying I don't think they have that arseholish manner - they are simply replicating it because it is available.

I.e. if you don't like it the solution is not AGPL or source available but no reuse allowrd or whatever, it's closed source.

Exactly. If you don't agree with the OSS terms, don't license your code with an OSS license. OSS is not the default answer because there's no default answer. You have to think about what you want to achieve and license accordingly. Even then, there will be bad actors who don't care about you suing them, that will happen with any license (OSS or not).

It pains me to say this because I started in a proprietary software world early in my career and I hate it for 99% of the use cases but... proprietary licenses do have a place.

The author spells out that they absolutely don't want it closed source. They do want the common requirements of copyleft licences, so it seems that the solution is one of those.

The author also thinks the people they're upset about are jerks, even though they fully acknowledge they have the right to be. They're fairly clear about that. And even if they continued to be jerks, the author would be happier if the license they had chosen required them to be slightly less jerkish.

I know, what I mean is that I think if you want it to be source available at all (not even 'Open Source' necessarily) you have to accept that this is going to happen.

(Or at least could, and the more it sounds like a small helper lib / WordPress plugin type thing the more likely. As much as some dislike it, this is a big selling point of GitHub and its stars etc. OP's things sound like something I'd find on Sourceforge, and not really be able to work out if it was original or not.)

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