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Comment by roflmaostc | Hacker News Reader

Why? There is no legal requirement for a LICENSE

https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/managing-your-reposi...

"You're under no obligation to choose a license. However, without a license, the default copyright laws apply, meaning that you retain all rights to your source code and no one may reproduce, distribute, or create derivative works from your work."

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I have read the quoted GitHub docs page before and also found it somewhat odd. Not because it shouldn't be allowed to post public code without a LICENSE (or with a restrictive one), but because GitHub has a "Fork" button on every repository. It's strange to me that GitHub has a one-click button that can violate the default terms of code uploaded to the site.

GitHub's terms of use state that by uploading code to the site, you grant people permission to click "Fork".

Because that use case feels pretty far from the typical one for a public GitHub repo. Even when it was intended, having reliable metadata indicating that fact would be nice.

Absolutely agreed, but there's a vast difference between "would be nice" and "should require". I for one strongly prefer to avoid putting up any additional barriers to sharing, even at the cost of the default value being all rights reserved (which is a sensible default).

I'm not saying there is. I'm saying there should be. Posting code publicly on github without a licence is entirely pointless

This is similar to saying that posting code anywhere online is useless. Not everyone is trying to start a collaborative project. Sometimes people just use github to showcase code, because it's a convenient platform.

But it's already questionably legal to just look at it. If you don't even use that, then that's what private repos are for

Now you really are being silly. Most content on the internet doesn't have an explicit license. It's in no way legally dubious to look at it. Code is not special in this regard.

No, you're being disingenuous. Why are you looking at code? It isn't prose you read for fun. You are actively working with it. Which means you're working on some form of derivative work, which takes us back to the copyright issue.

If I'm looking at everything else on the internet with the purpose of trying to transform it in some way, that's definitely a potential copyright issue.

I'm not being disingenuous. It's not quite for fun, but sometimes I do read code to learn from it. Lots of stuff on github is just for portfolio purposes.

Your last sentence basically admits that the fundamental legal situation of code and prose, independent of usage, is the same. If your only possible interest in code is to "transform it in some way", that's your problem, not ours.

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