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Comment by SoftTalker | Hacker News Reader

If you put your information freely on the web, you should have minimal expectations on who uses it and how. If you want to make money from it, put up a paywall.

If you want the best of both worlds, i.e. just post freely but make money from ads, or inserting hidden pixels to update some profile about me, well good luck. I'll choose whether I want to look at ads, or load tracking pixels, and my answer is no.

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> If you put your information freely on the web, you should have minimal expectations on who uses it and how.

Does this only apply to "information" or should we treat all open source code as public domain?

In a lot of circumstances, that is exactly the case. What the open source license stops is redistribution under terms that violate the license, not usage itself. An individual can very well take your open source code, make any changes they want, compile and use it for their own purposes without adhering to the terms of your license - as long as they don't redistribute it.

All "open source" code was already pretty much public domain. All they'd have to do was put a page of OSI-approved licenses up on the site, right? An index of Open Source projects and their authors? Is this more than a weeks work to comply?

Free Software is the only place where this is a real abridgement of rights and intention, and it's over. They've already been trained on all of it, and no judge will tell them to stop, and no congressman will tell them to stop.

I'm not talking about ads or pixels, I'm referring to bot operators creating so much traffic that the network bill makes the hosting financially impossible

> my answer is no.

Rights for me, but not for thee?

You have every right to take the content offline, or to put any technical barriers you desire in place to access it - but that's about all you should be able to do.

If you don't want to lose money and don't feel confident that you can protect your content with technical measures, best to take your stuff off the internet.

I'm confused as to what you consider "technical barriers" that doesn't cover, say, using Cloudflare's solution. Or some other way of blocking things that look like bots.

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