Hacker News Reader

Comment by revscat | Hacker News Reader

The language is pretty clear to me. I understand what you’re saying, and suspect that this is an honest oversight on their part, but as it currently reads forks are prohibited.

They may have meant something else, but what it says now is “no forking.”

View on HN

They know exactly what they're doing. They're open-washing the program to get attention. It worked. As I write this, it's the number one YComb story. But, it's in no way, shape, or form open source.

I am all for reverse Hanlon[0]: don't assume incompetence when people profit from something. I think however that "source available" is a legit business model, and not just a HN hack. They made their source code available after all. Although it isn't compatible with github, as the others pointed it out.

[0] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor

It's not "Open Source", to use the capitalized term the OSI attempts to gatekeep. It fits most non-zealots' definition, though.

How is it zealous to prevent people from co-opting and diluting the meaning, like you have done here? If anything, companies are trying to misuse "open source" for their source-available code.

Well, it's at least slightly more open than e.g. Microsoft's source-available repositories, let alone leaked proprietary source; as you do have the freedom to e.g. read the Winamp source code and then ground-up reimplement a Winamp-alike program, without their lawyers coming after you. (Orgs like ReactOS don't let people contribute if they've ever read code from a Microsoft source-available repos, lest ideas inspired by that code end up in the ReactOS codebase, and Microsoft sue them for that.)

I'm not sure what to call a codebase that only grants you the (implicit) right to not be sued for reading the source and then getting inspired by it, though.

I thought reading closed-source code is a very bad idea, as if you wind up writing something similar, then you're possibly guilty of copyright infringement. If you have one team look at the design, catalog the features, and describe how it works in detail, then you can have another team implement it, and you're on legally much better ground (unless patents):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design

> I thought reading closed-source code is a very bad idea, as if you wind up writing something similar, then you're possibly guilty of copyright infringement.

The idea is to avoid accidentally copying code, though TBH i think this is some sort of legend that comes from decades ago and not really practical (nor, as the article mentions, required by law). Writing something similar alone won't make you guilty of anything, otherwise people who worked as programmers wouldn't be able to work at a different company on the same or similar field again ever.

I think this is a great license as it allows you to download the code, make modifications, create "pull requests", etc, but you are not allowed to compete, or distribute it with a virus baked in. That way the maintainers have full control and don't have to worry about hostile takeovers, or people making profits without contributing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com