Choosing an Open Source License | Hacker News Reader

Choosing an Open Source License

github.com

78 pointscleverjake8 comments

Thankyouthankyouthankyou! This has been one of my longest outstanding gripes with GitHub. By not including any mention of licensing when creating a new public repo, I feel that GitHub was tacitly encouraging the "licenses are for lawyers not hackers" mindset.

For anyone who still doesn't think licenses are a big deal, I would wager that you have never:

a) worked for a company with > $1B in assets

b) worked for a startup that might be acquired by a company with > $1B in assets

One question: how can the "no-license" option (i.e. "Copyright [year] [fullname]") allow "Private Use" and "Commercial Use"?

I think that what is allowed is highly dependent from the laws you can or want apply. There is a vast difference between what is allowed by such a short statement in the US or in UK or in Germany.

[1] http://choosealicense.com/no-license/

[IANAL] Copyright does not cover use, it covers distribution and similar rights. In order to cover use, you need a patent.

That said, I'm not sure if downloading the source from Github constitutes any form of reproduction or distribution. From what the page you linked to says, that may be covered by Github terms of service.

> Copyright does not cover use

This difference between US and EU author's rights has been widely debated for the JSON licence that states "The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil.", making it a non-free licence because it restricts the field of use.

I'd like to see this combined with https://licentious.herokuapp.com/

I already did: http://www.addalicense.com/

GitHub - of all places - still needs support for Contributor License Agreements (CLAs) and a bot to support it, though. But it's a good step in the right direction.

Someone finally created a page with that. Thank you.

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