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Comment by copper-float | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, honestly. I love open source as much as the next guy, but I don't understand why people are so up in arms about this. The license feels pretty reasonable.

The source code is fully available, none of the features are paywalled. They only prohibit you from taking their code and reselling it.

If you take a look at the Play Store, there are thousands of instances where open source projects are lazily renamed and sold for $5 or $10. It's the definition of scummy, pathetic, worthless behavior, and I'm glad the license prevents those kinds of leeches from succeeding.

I know this isn't the only case, but it's the majority of cases. So I have no problem with their license at all.

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The license doesn't prevent those leeches from succeeding. They will republish your app, whether it is fully proprietary or licensed under the GPLv3, and neither Google nor Apple will respond to takedown requests for apps. We get many reports of this behavior in an Android developer community I help moderate, it's pretty obvious there are a few known actors doing this with hundreds of apps, and the stores don't care.

So no, the license doesn't matter.

Yeah, it's pretty pathetic on Google and Apple's part.

It might be not a foolproof solution, but I think the license is better than nothing. Then you have a legal precedent that you can cite when you file a lawsuit against these rats.

Most of these people doing this probably aren't in the same country. But whatever. It's better than nothing.

> They only prohibit you from taking their code and reselling it.

They prohibit you from removing the constant nags about buying a licence.

I know a way you could remove those nags.

I know two:

1. Paying and clicking “I paid”

2. Not paying and still clicking “I paid”

So it’s an honour system right now.

That said, if they ever implement e.g. license keys or some other mean of actually checking that you’ve paid, seems that you would be able to remove it and recompile, you just can’t help others do that:

> Notwithstanding the above, you may not remove or obscure any functionality in the software related to payment to the Licensor in any copy you distribute to others.

(IANAL)

The nags that you could just click "I bought a license" to remove without actually buying one?

Or you know, also buy the license and click it honestly.

It's just another proprietary software, on the lesser evil side of spectrum. The reason for people being so up in arms about it, is because voting for lesser evil makes it greater.

The reason I prefer open-source software is that I can inspect and modify the source code if I want to. With this license, I can still do that, even if it’s not technically “open-source™” by the OSI definition. Therefore, I don’t see a reason to object to it. The OSI definition is made for the benefit of big corporations, not people like me.

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