Anubis saved our websites from a DDoS attack
fabulous.systems
fabulous.systems
The search engines always seemed happy to announce that they are in fact GoogleBot/BingBot/Yahoo/whatever and frequently provided you with their expected IP ranges. The modern companies, mostly AI companies, seems to be more interested in flying under the radar, and have less respect for the internet infrastructure at a whole. So we're now at a point where I can't tell if it's an ill willed DDoS attack or just shitty AI startup number 7 reloading training data.
I think that makes a lot of sense. Google's goal is (or perhaps used to be) providing a network of links. The more they scrape you, the more visitors you may end up receiving, and the better your website performs (monetarily, or just in terms of providing information to the world).
With AI companies, the goal is to consume and replace. In their best case scenario, your website will never receive a visitor again. You won't get anything in return for providing content to AI companies. That means there's no reason for website administrators to permit the good ones, especially for people who use subscriptions or ads to support their website operating costs.
I don’t think that’s really true. The AI companies’ goal is to consume and create something else.
> You won't get anything in return for providing content to AI companies.
That was the original problem with websites in general, and the ‘solution’ was ads. It would be really, really cool if the thing which finally makes micropayments happen is AI.
And then we humans could use micropayments too. Of course, the worst of both worlds would be micropayments and ads.
A lot of those sites are at risk of being made irrelevant by AI companies who really don't give a shit about your motivations for doing something for free. If their crawler kills your site and their LLM steals views by regurgitation answers based on your work, so be it, you served your purpose.
If you want to talk payment: Ask the AI companies to pay you when they generate an answer based on your work, a license fee. That will kill their business model pretty quickly.
Fair use is being abused big time by AI companies and search engines before that even
How is that different from a human being reading my underwater basket weaving site and starting his own, ‘stealing’ ‘my’ views? Or a thousand human beings out of the billions on Earth doing the same thing?
Sure, in either situation you could say "They trying to harm me using bullets," but one of them is much more likely to succeed, and we probably shouldn't treat the situations or costs to your well being as legally identical.
You're correct that there's not really anything stopping a person from ripping you of, tweaking your work just enough that it's not a copy right violation. Unless that person themselves have a really good grasp of the topic and can contribute it will become clear that they are getting the content else where and the readers will end up there in the end. Many, not all obviously, will also provide attribution, something LLMs rarely do.
Then you have the issue that the person publishing something on their own little server now has to deal with commercial companies just hammering their sites into the ground and they have to deal with that problem, just so someone can do an automated version of content theft?
A lot of things people could potentially do are minor issues, until it's automated and commercialized.
I have a personal blog. It's free. I write because I want humans to read my work, not because I want to provide a free labor to AI companies.
This argument doesn't work here.
AI scrapping bots provide zero value for sites owners.
Anubis is DDoS protection, just with updated marketing. These tools have existed forever, such as CloudFlare Challenges, or https://github.com/RuiSiang/PoW-Shield. Or HashCash.
I keep saying that Anubis really has nothing much to do with AI (e.g. some people might mistakenly think that it magically "blocks AI scrapers"; it only slows down abusive-rate visitors). It really only deals with DoS and DDoS.
I don't understand why people are using Anubis instead of all the other tools that already exist. Is it just marketing? Saying the right thing at the right time?
Anubis is getting real love out there and I think I am all for it. I personally host a lot of my stuff on cloudflare due to it being free with cloudflare workers but if I ever have a vps, I am probably going to use anubis as well
How can anyone provide a cryptographic challenge without javascript feels like black magic.
Can you please explain to me how it works without javascript?
Javascript might be better to run in scratchpad.
CloudFlare doesn't do that. Cloudflare's false positive rate is extremely high, as are the others. Mostly because they all depend on bleeding edge JS and browser functions (CORS, etc) for fingerprinting functionality.
Cloudflare is for for-profit and other situations where you don't care if you block poor people because they can't give you money anyway. Anubis is for if you want everyone to be able to access your website.
Care to share existing solutions that can be self-hosted ? (genuine question, I like how Anubis works, I just want something with a more neutral look and feel).
If it is perfect for your needs other than the look, you could update the superficial parts to match your liking?
If it is designed in such a way as to make this difficult, such as if the visible content & styling is tangled within the code rather than all in static assets (I've not looked at the code myself yet), then perhaps raise an issue suggesting that this is changed (or if you are a coder yourself, perhaps do so and raise a pull request for your changes).
Given how popular the tool seems to be coming, I expect theming this sort of theming will be an official feature eventually anyway, of you are patient.
Of course the technique it uses is well know and documented, so there may already be other good implementations that match your visual needs without any of the above effort.
I would, but the author is not ok with this:
> Anubis is provided to the public for free in order to help advance the common good. In return, we ask (but not demand, these are words on the internet, not word of law) that you not remove the Anubis character from your deployment. If you want to run an unbranded or white-label version of Anubis, please contact Xe to arrange a contract.
Though method used is not novel, and reimplementing shouldn't be too difficult if you wish to use it without their aesthetics without going against their politely expressed wishes.
btw it only works on AI scrapers because they're DDoSes.
One thing that I've noticed recently with the Arch Wiki adding Anubis, is that this one week period doesn't magically fix user annoyances with Anubis. I use Temporary Containers for every tab, which means that I constantly get Anubis regenerating tokens, since the cookie gets deleted as soon as the tab is closed.
Perhaps this is my own problem, but given the state of tracking on the internet, I do not feel it is an extremely out-of-the-ordinary circumstance to avoid saving cookies.
Unfortunately nobody has a good answer for how to deal with abusive users without catching well behaved but deliberately anonymous users in the crossfire, so it's just about finding the least bad solution for them.
A sufficiently advanced web scraper can build a statistical model of fingerprint payloads that are categorized by CF as legit and change their proxy on demand.
The only person who will end up blocked is the regular user.
There is also a huge market of proprietary anti-bot solvers, not to mention services that charge you per captcha-solution. Usually it's just someone who managed to crack the captcha and is generating the solutions automatically, since the response time is usually a few hundred milliseconds.
This is a problem with every commercial Anti-bot/captcha solution and not just CF, but also AWS WAF, Akamai, etc.
Uhh, that's not right. There is a good answer, but no turnkey solution yet.
The answer is making each request cost a certain amount of something from the person, and increased load by that person comes with increased cost on that person.
All the best,
-HG
No, cost is used in the fullest abstract meaning of the word here.
Time cost, effort cost, monetary cost, work cost, so long as there is a functional limitation that prevents resource exhaustion that is the point.
I use a certain online forum which sometimes makes users wait 60 or 900 seconds before they can post. It has prevented me from making contributions multiple times.
Cloudflare's checkbox challenge is probably the better challenge systems. Other security systems are far worse, requiring either something to be solved, or a more annoying action (eg. holding a button for 5 seconds).
The problem is when cloudflare doesn't let you through.
Don't use an unusual browser configuration then, like spoofing user-agents or whatever? If you're doing it for "privacy" reasons, it's likely counterproductive. The fact that cloudflare can detect it means that the spoofing isn't doing a very good job, and therefore you're making yourself more fingerprintable.
Examples?
Punishing people for not having Google cookies is probably the most obnoxious one.
For pure POW (no fingerprinting), mCaptcha is a nice drop-in replacement you can self-host: https://mcaptcha.org/
The issue I'm talking about is specifically how frustrating it is to hit yet another site that has switched to Anubis recently and having to enable cookies for it.
What you ought to do is warn the user. It's easy enough to detect server-side if cookies are disabled, because if you set one it ought to be sent on any subsequent requests. If requests after the initial site hit don't have the cookie, it clearly failed to set and/or send, so instead of refreshing the page over and over you should display an error.
This isn't a problem exclusively with Anubis, there are some other sites that will endlessly refresh if you don't have cookies enabled, but it's really poor practice to not handle error conditions in your application.
There's no real way to hide that you're visiting the site and clicking multiple pages during that visit, so I don't see what's so bad about accepting a first party cookie for an hour.
I'm not naive - I know that it is possible to track me using other server-side tools even with all this effort, but on the other hand I'm easily in the 0.1% most difficult users to track, which means a lot of web devs are going to use the easy approaches that work for 99% of users and leave me alone. That's a worthwhile trade to make, for me.
Is that why it now shows that annoying slow to load prompt before giving me the content I searched for?
[1] https://anubis.techaro.lol/docs/admin/algorithm-selection
The fast/slow selection still applies, but if you put up the difficulty, even the fast version will take some time.
edit: Because HN is throwing "you're posting too fast" errors again:
> That falls short of the "meets their needs" test. Authenticated users already have a check (i.e., the auth process). Anubis is to stop/limit bots from reading content.
Arch Wiki is a high value target for scraping so they'll just solve the anubis challenge once a week. It's not going to stop them.
The goal of Anubis isn't to stop them from scraping entirely, but rather to slow down aggressive scraping (e.g. sites with lots of pages being scraped every 6 hours[1]) so that the scraping doesn't impact the backend nearly as much
[1] https://pod.geraspora.de/posts/17342163, which was linked as an example in the original blog post describing the motivation for anubis[2]
Still need a layer there, could also have been a manual login to pull a session token.
ISTR that Anubis allows the site-owner to control the expiry on the check; if you're still getting hit by bots, turn the check to 5s with a lower "work" effort so that every request will take (say) 2s, and only last for 5s.
(Still might not help though, because that optimises for bots at the expense of humans - a human will only do maybe one actual request every 30 - 200 seconds, while a bot could do a lot in 5s).
An obvious followup is to decrement it by a larger amount if requests are made at a higher frequency.
Yup. Anubis breaks the web. And it requires JavaScript, which also breaks the web. It’s a disaster.
I guess if your cookie expired at just the right time that could cause this issue, and that might be worth thinking about, but I think "breaks the web" is overstating it a bit, at least for the default configuration.
These crawlers are designed to work on 99% of hosts, if you tweak your site just so slightly out of spec, these bots wouldn’t know what to do.
Yes it could be in higher layer than what I suggested indeed, on top of HTTP sounds good to me.
My rule of thumb is that it should work with curl (which makes it not antibots, but just anti scrapper & ddos, which is what I have a problem with)
It's basic separation of responsibilities. It's helpful for reuse but also innovation. For example, the auth scheme baked in to HTTP is pretty much stuck in time and not very useful. We'd likely be better off if it wasn't tightly coupled to something unrelated like that. If I were implementing an HTTP stack I'd want to omit it, but that would make me noncompliant.
And I would argue Anubis does nothing to stop real DDoS attacks that just indiscriminately blast sites with tens of gbps of traffic at once from many different IPs.
We shut down the website/http frontend to our git repo. There are still 20k distinct IP addresses per day hitting up a site that issues NOTHING but 404 errors.
Caching is already enabled, but this doesn’t work for the highly dynamic parts of the site like version history and looking for recent changes.
And yes, it doesn’t work for volumetric attacks with tens of gbps. At this point I don’t think it is a targeted attack, probably a crawler gone really wild. But for this pattern, it simply works.
If you have expensive URLs that you can't serve more than, say 3 of at a time, or 100 of per minute, NOT rate limiting them will end up keeping real users out simply because of the lack of resources.
They wait until your phone is on wifi / battery, then make requests on behalf of whoever has paid the analytics firm for access to 'their' residential IP pool.
INFATICA LTD
Reg. No.: 14863491
Unit A, 82 James Carter Road, Mildenhall, Suffolk, IP28 7DE, United Kingdom
2. The US is currently broken and they are not going to punish only, albeit unsustainable, growth in their economy.
3. Internet is global. Even EU wants to regulate, will they charge big tech leaders and companies with information tech crimes which will pierce the corporate veil? It will ensure that nobody will invest in unsustainable AI growth in the EU. However fucking up economy and the planet is how the world operates now, and without infinite growth you lose buying power for everything. So everybody else will continue to do fuckery.
4. What can a regulating body do? Force disconnects for large swaths of internet? Then Internet is no more.
By far most malware is legal and a portion of its income is used to fund election campaigns.
Volumetric DDoS and application layer DDoS are both real, but volumetric DDoS doesn't have an opportunity for cute pictures. You really just need a big enough inbound connection and then typically drop inbound UDP and/or IP fragments and turn off http/3. If you're lucky, you can convince your upstream to filter out UDP for you, which gives you more effective bandwidth.
Flat out user-agent blacklist seems really weird, it's going to reward the companies that are more unethical in their scraping practices than the ones who report their user agent truthfully. From the repo it also seems like all the AI crawlers are also DENY, which, again, would reward AI companies that don't disclose their identity in the user agent.
I'm aware that end users can modify the rules, but in reality most will just use the defaults.
Honest AI scrapers use the information to learn, which increases their value, and the owner of the scraped server has to pay for it, getting nothing back — there's nothing honest about it. Search engines give you visitors, AI spiders only take your money.
And, of course, the link just shows the default behaviour. Website admins can change them to their needs.
I'm sure there will be workarounds (like that version of curl that has its HTTP stack replaced by Chrome's) but things are ever moving forward.
If you run a fleet of servers, all doing different things, Apache is a good choice because all the various uses are going to be supported. It might not be the best choice in each individual case, but it is the one that works in all of them.
I don't know why some are so quick to write off Apache. Is just because it's old? It's still something like the second most used webserver in the world.
I started using it when Oracle's Webcache wouldn't support newer certificates and I had to keep Oracle Portal running. I could edit the incoming certificate (I had to snip the header and the footer) and put it in a specific header for Portal to accept it.
> As an attacker with stupid bots, you’ll never get through. As an attacker with clever bots, you’ll end up exhausting your own resources.
But the attack was clearly from a botnet, so the attacker isn’t paying for the resources consumed. Why don’t the zombie machines just spend the extra couple seconds to solve the PoW (at which point, they would apparently be exempt for a week and would be able to continue the attack)? Is it just that these particular bots were too dumb?
The likely explanation is that the bots are just curling the expensive URLs without a proper JavaScript engine to solve the challenge.
E.g. if I hack a bunch of routers around the world to act as my botnet, I probably wouldn't have enough storage to install Chrome or Selenium. The lightweight solution is just to use curl/wget (which may be pre-installed) or netcat/telnet.
Oh hey, that’s a pretty utilitarian stack and I’m happy to see MariaDB be used out there.
Anubis is also really cool, I do imagine that proof of work might become more prevalent in the future to deal with the sheer amount of bots and bad actors (shame that they exist) out there, albeit in the case of hijacked devices it might just slow them down, hopefully to a manageable degree, instead of IP banning them altogether.
I do wonder if we’ll ever see HTTP only versions of PoW too, not just JS based options, though that might need to be a web standard or something.
Amazon, Akamai, Kasada and other big players in the WAF/Antibot industry will charge you millions for the illusion of protection and half-baked javascript fingerprint collectors.
They usually calculate how "legit" your request is based on ambiguous factors, like the vendor name of your GPU (good luck buying flight tickets in a VM) or how anti-aliasing is implemented on you fonts/canvas. Total bullshit. Most web scrapers know how to bypass it. Especially the malicious ones.
But the biggest reason why I'm against these kind of systems is how they support the browser mono-culture. Your UA is from Servo or Ladybird? You're out of luck. That's why the idea choosing a purely browser-agnostic way of "weighting the soul" of a request resonates highly with me. Keep up the good work!
It would be great if there was a standard for that so that all kinds of clients knew how to provide a proof of work, e.g. like this:
WWW-Authenticate: Proof-Of-Work difficulty=5 challenge=XYZ
Authorization: Proof-Of-Work abc
Seriously.
The only is issue I can think of is there may be browsers or browser extensions that preload links to show thumbnails and users might be banned without knowing why.
Ja4 fingerprinting is a new-ish in interesting approach, not for blocking but as an extra metric to validate trust on requests
Some differences:
- Uses HAProxy (duh)
- Proof of work can be either sha256 or argon2
- Optional recaptcha/hcaptcha in addition to the proof of work
- Includes a script for your page that will re-solve the challenge in the background before the cookie expires
There's also a control panel, dns server, etc. I kinda built my own everything because I refused to use bunny/cloudflare/whatever.
One thing I will say though, is that proof-of-work alone isn't a solution for ddos mitigation and bot protection! I've seen attackers using a mass of proxies and headless browsers to solve the challenge, or even writing code to extract and solve the challenge directly (https://github.com/lizthegrey/tor-fetcher). To adequately protect against more targeted attacks, you need additional acl and heuristics, browser fingerprinting, tls fingerprinting, ip reputation, etc. I do offer the whole thing setup as a commercial service, but will refrain from too much shilling.
It's fun, and I love seeing similar softwares help fight the horde of AI scrapers :^)
If you make the challenge sufficiently difficult enough, it should mitigate this no?
>or even writing code to extract and solve the challenge directly (https://github.com/lizthegrey/tor-fetcher).
Similarly if the challenge is difficult, wouldn't matter where it's solved.
I'm not sure why one would use Anubis over haproxy-protection.
It should explain it isn't mining and just verifying the browser or such.
I'm guessing folks have seen enough captcha and CloudFlare verification pages to get a sense that they're being "soul" checked and that it's not an issue usability-wise.
>Anubis is provided to the public for free in order to help advance the common good. In return, we ask (but not demand, these are words on the internet, not word of law) that you not remove the Anubis character from your deployment.
>If you want to run an unbranded or white-label version of Anubis, please contact Xe to arrange a contract.
Hope this is useful to others!
Compare to a take-a-penny-leave-a-penny tray from an era past. You are legally allowed to scoop up all the pennies into a bag, and leave the store, then repeat at the neighboring store, and make a few bucks. You'd be an asshole, but not face legal trouble. You "followed the rules" to the letter. But guess what? If you publish an easy how-to guide with "one weird trick" for making some quick cash, and people start adopting your antisocial behavior and emptying out change trays, you've forced the issue and now either a) businesses will stop offering this convenience or b) the rules around it will be tightened and the utility will be degraded. In the concrete case of Anubis, the maintainers may decide to stop contributing their time to this useful software or place a non-FOSS license on it in an attempt to stop gain-maximizing sociopaths from exploiting their efforts.
I even it out by how I prioritize feature requests, bug reports, and the like :)
I didn't implement this out of fear or some lack of courage. In fact I had the original avatars up for quite a while. I simply wanted my own logo so visitors wouldn't be potentially confused. It seemed to fit the use case and there was no way to achieve what I wanted without reaching out. I didn't feel comfortable bugging you or anybody on account of my tiny little no-traffic git forge even though, yes, that is what you politely asked for (and did not demand).
I think if you do feel this strongly you might consider changing the software's license or the phrasing of the request in the documentation. Or perhaps making it very clear that no matter how small, you want to be reached out to for the whitelabel version.
I think the success story of Anubis has been awesome to read about and follow and seeing how things unfold further will be fun to watch and possibly even contribute to. I'm personally rooting for you and your project!
Your analogy to me seems imprecise, as analogies tend to be when it comes to digital goods. I'm not taking pennies in any sense here, preventing the next person from making use of some public good.
You can make a similar argument for piracy or open source, and yet... Here we all still are and open source has won for the most part.
The GPL protects users from any restrictions the author wants to use. No additional restrictions are allowed, whether technical or legal.
In this case, the restriction is social, but is a restriction nonetheless (some enforce it by harassment, some by making you feel bad).
But you could ignore it, even fork it and create a white label version, and be proud of it (thereby bypassing the restriction). Donate voluntarily if you want to contribute, without being restricted technically, legally, or socially.
Some project even took it to the next level and displayed a furry porn. I think anime and furry graphics are related, esp. in the weird obsession of the people to shove it to the unsuspecting people, but since it's "cute" it's passable. Well unless it gets into the porn territory.
On the other hand I applaud the author for an interesting variation of making the free product slightly degraded so people are incentived to donate money. The power of defaults and their misuse.
Personally I'm not fan of enshittification of any kind even a slight one even when it's to my own detriment.
Except the author is not shoving any stuff at you. Author doesn't owe anything to you and can do whatever they want and you doesn't owe the author the obligation to use their software.
It's not business, it's a person giving something free to the world and asking people who uses it to play the game. You can chose to not play the game or to not use it, but you can't act like your issue with an anime character is the author's fault. Just don't install it on your server and go ahead.
Are you sure you have the right pronouns for Xe?
This is your weird association and hang-up. That's on you to deal with, not Anubis or the rest of the internet.
Really though my dayjob kinda burns me out because I have to focus on AEO, which is SEO but for AI. I get by making and writing about cool things, but damn does it hurt having to write for machines instead of humans.
The code is open source, so I can’t imagine making a fork to remove that is a Herculean effort.
> Regardless, Xe did ask nicely to not change out the images shipped as a whitelabel service is planned in the future
https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis/pull/204#issuecomment-27...
That feels uncomfortably close to returning to the privacy-and-CGNAT-hating embrace of cloudflare et al.
Anywhere I can read more about this? Sounds super interesting, and a cursory search didn’t show anything for it on your site.
Otherwise I’m sure I’ll hear about it soon anyway, at the rate Anubis is going!
I am also working on some noJS checks, but I want to test them with paid customers in order to let a thousand flowers bloom.
Of course, if you use this service for your enterprise, the Right Thing To Do would be support the excellent project financially, but this is by no means required.
If you want to use this project on your site and don’t like the logo, you are free to change it. If the site is personal and this project is not something you would spend money on, I don’t even think it is unethical to change the image.
Note that I’m not faulting you for behaving this way, no insult or disparagement intended, etc.! Open source inherited this dissonance between giving it all away to anyone who asks for free, and giving nothing of yours back in return because prosocial is not an ethical standard, from its predecessor belief system. It remains unsolved decades later, in both open source and libertarianism, and I certainly don’t hold generic exploiters of the prosocial-imbalance defect accountable for the underlying flaw in both belief systems.
I’m trying to imagine how this might be unethical. The only scenario I can think of is if the authors wanted the code to not be modified in certain ways, but felt based on more deeply held principles that the code should be made FOSS. But I struggle to see how both ideas could exist simultaneously - if you think code should be free then you think there is no ethical issue with people modifying it to fit their use.
If you believe in giving away code because that’s open-source prosocial, then open-source adherents will claim that taking advantage of you is ethical, because if you didn’t want to be exploited, you shouldn’t have been open-source prosocial in the first place. And by treating “pay me if you get paid for my code” licenses as treated as evil and shameful, exploiters place pressures on prosocial maintainers into adopting open source licenses, even though they’ll then be exploited by people who don’t care about being prosocial, eventually burning out the maintainer who either silent-quits or rage-quits.
Of course, if OSI signed off on “if you get rich from my source code you have to share some of that wealth back to me” as a permissible form of clause in open source licensing, that would of course break the maintainer burnout cycle — but I’m certainly not holding my breath.
But I do agree that this is the crux of the issue.
Blatantly untrue. Companies riding the coattails of the opensource moniker for PR points while using restrictive licenses is what garners all the hate. It's essentially fraud committed to garner good press.
The other thing that gets people riled up is companies with a CLA that they claim is for responsible stewardship suddenly pulling a fast one and relicensing the project to a non-OSI license. It's perfectly legal but it tends to upset people.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with source available software at any level of restriction. Just be very clear about what it is and isn't.
> Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software
I disagree.
Licenses that prohibit exploitation of source code for personal reward are treated with hostility, shame, and boycotts — claiming that to restrict in any way the liberty of another person to exploit one’s work is unethical. Human beings are social creatures, and most human beings are not asocial with decoupled ethical systems like myself; so, given the social pressures in play, few human beings truly have the liberty to pick another license and endure the shame and vitriol that exercising that freedom earns from us.
Since the original subject is also about swapping out the imagery, it's also difficult to take your argument too seriously as the term "exploit" is doing a lot of heavy lifting for your argument.
I will also add that the social and ethical component goes both ways: is it ethical to knowingly give something away freely and without restriction and then immediately attempt to impose restrictions through a purely social mechanism? I would say so as long as your expectation is that some might politely decline.
Or worse, some may respond with the same vitriol and then we're at your original point, which doesn't seem to be preventing such an approach here, making me doubt your hypothesis.
I'd have to disagree. However let's just run with it because your subsequent reasoning doesn't seem consistent to me.
If you do A you'll be met with hostility. So instead you do B, but then you add a request "actually please abide by A" and somehow this is supposed to not be met with hostility? You can't have it both ways. B but with an addendum that makes it A is just A wearing a mask. Changing the name doesn't change the thing.
See also: “Npm should remove the default license from new packages” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43864518
Such a license does not comply with your requirements; yet, it is also valid under case law, even if it is statistically unlikely to permit enforcement against most claimed evils. Each society has certain evils that are widely accepted by the courts, so it certainly isn’t a get out of all possible jails free card.
The purpose of a license is to inform of the rights available. The user is responsible for evaluating the license, or for trusting the judgment of a third party if they are uninterested in evaluating themselves.
If the author’s entire license “This is free software for free uses, please contact me for a paid license for paid uses” then that is statistically likely to be court enforceable against exploitation, so long as the terms offered are reasonable to the judge and any expert witnesses called. The Free Software Foundation does not have exclusive rights to the words “free software”. Adoption will be much reduced for someone who writes such a license, of course, and perhaps someone will exploit a loophole that a lengthier outsourced license would have covered. Neither of those outcomes are necessarily worth the time and effort to try and prevent, especially when use of any open source license guarantees the right of exploitation for unshared profit in plain language versus the homegrown one which does not.
(I am not your lawyer, this is not legal advice.)
Using a license that allows the software to be distributed and modified, while placing restrictions or exemptions to those permissions outside of the license, at the very least sends mixed signals. My point is that if the author wants to make those restrictions, that's fine, but the license is the correct place for it. What's shitty from my moral perspective is using a commonly accepted free software license for marketing purposes, but then judging people for not following some arbitrary demands. If anything, _that_ is the unethical behavior.
"we ask (but not demand, these are words on the internet, not word of law) that you not remove the Anubis character from your deployment"
For whatever reason somebody decided to blow it out of proportion here on hn.
You're ignoring the possibility that users of the software might not agree with the author's wishes. There's nothing unethical about that.
A request to not change a part of the software is the same as a request to not use the software in specific industries, or for a specific purpose. There are many projects that latch on open source for brand recognition, but then "forbid" the software to be used in certain countries, by military agencies, etc. If the author wants to restrict how the software can be used, then it's not libre software.
I don't believe it is possible to reconcile these ethical views, as a ethical subjectivist.
Edit to add, an example of a non-contradictory request might be to contribute monetarily in proportion to the financial benefit you derive. It's an additional non-binding request to help sustain the community which seems reasonably consistent with the ethos of opensource to me.
The issue is that opensource is a movement that comes with a set of values attached. The licenses aren't impersonal the way the copyright system at large is.
Sure, you can say it’s unethical in that it directly contravenes their request - I won’t argue that - but it’s the smallest of violations.
As far as I can see it’s MIT licensed so you have no legal obligation otherwise. If they truly cared about people keeping the character, they should have made the request with teeth.
I don’t even understand why they made the request in the first place. The nature of the request makes it seem as though it isn’t actually important at all, so why make the request at all? It just puts everyone else in an uncomfortable position. If keeping the character is important, then why release it under MIT license?
I'm seeing this sentiment multiple times on this thread - "fine, it's legal, but it's still wrong!"
That's an extremely disrespectful take on someone adhering to a contract that both parties agreed to. You are using shaming language to pressure people into following your own belief system.
In this specific instance, the author could have chosen any damn license they wanted to. They didn't. They chose one to get the most adoption.
You appear to want both:
1. Widespread adoption
and
2. Restrict what others can do.
The MIT license is not compatible with #2 above. You can ask nicely, but if you don't get what you want you don't get to jump on a fucking high horse and religiously judge others using your own belief system.
Author should have used GPL (so any replaced images get upstreamed back and thus he has control) OR some other proprietary license that prevents modifications like changing the image.
A bunch of finger-pointers gabbing on forums about those "evil" people who stick to both the word and the spirit of the license are nothing more than the modern day equivalent of witch-hunters using "intent" to secure a prosecution.
Be better than that - don't join the mob in pointing out witches. We don't need more puritans.
In this case upstreaming replaced images wouldn't be useful to the author anyway, they are going to keep the anime image.
In this case, it would be, because (presumably) the new images are the property of the user, and they would hardly want (for example) their company logo to be accidentally GPL'ed.
For example, if an employee does something hostile towards society at their employer when they have the freedom to choose not to do so — and since employment is at will, they always have that freedom to choose — I will tend to judge their antisocial actions unethical, even if their contract allows it. (This doesn’t mean I will therefore judge the person as unethical! One instance does not a pattern make, etc.)
So, for me, ethical judgments are not opt-out under any circumstance, nor can they be abrogated by contract or employment or law. I hold this is a non-negotiable position, so I will withdraw here; you’re welcome to continue persuading others if you wish.
I didn't claim it does, I am claiming that since ethics is subjective and the contract is not, you subjecting your moral standard to others is no different than a mob subjecting an old woman to accusations of being a witch.
Now, you may not have a problem publicly judging others, but your actions are barely different from those of the Westboro Baptist Church.
IOW, sure, you are allowed to publicly condemn people who hold different moral beliefs to you, but the optics are not good for you.
"no different than a mob subjecting an old woman to accusations of being a witch."
Well, you're not being driven out of your village or being executed... Also the person you're replying to has beeing rather polite. Hardly a witch hunt is it?
"barely different from those of the Westboro Baptist Church"
The church that interrupts the grieving of the families of dead soldiers to shout about how much they hate gay people? You seriously believe that the person you're repling to is "barely different" from that?
"IOW, sure, you are allowed to publicly condemn people who hold different moral beliefs to you, but the optics are not good for you."
You're literally condeming them for having different moral beliefs than you right now, while being much more accusatory about it, comparing them to some really vile people. I wonder how you feel the optics of this reflects on you, because I don't think it's good for you.
Why are you so offended that someone might judge you for ignoring the friendly request of someone giving you something for free?
I obviously disagree; smearing a veneer of civility over thought-policing does not make that thought policing any more acceptable.
> You're literally condeming them for having different moral beliefs than you right now,
You also appear to be claiming that, when being policed by puritans, one should politely put up with it. I also disagree - I don't think puritanical holier-than-thou comments deserve more civility than they give.
> I wonder how you feel the optics of this reflects on you, because I don't think it's good for you.
People pointing out thought-policing always look good ;-)
The ones who are crusading for it tend to look bad. I'm not too worried.
https://git.kernel.org/ changed theirs
I think its a great discussion though that gets to the heart of open source and software freedom and how that can seem orthogonal to business needs depending on how you squint.