Comment by eggbrain | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eggbrain | Hacker News Reader

First thing I check when I read "Free" is I see what the license is (MIT/BSD). Unfortunately, you can't find out what license the theme uses until you get the actual theme. You don't get the actual theme until you put your email address in. I couldn't submit my email address until I subscribed to the newsletter (but upon trying it again in incognito I wasn't prompted to subscribe -- might have been an error on my part, although the checkbox seems borked).

I went ahead and took the plunge with a Mailinator address to see what I could find out, and it looks like there isn't any license to the themes at all. I'm not sure if this is good or bad -- if code has no license, is it a free for all?

Second thing I check is whether the free theme inserts links in the code to their own website (visible or invisible). From what I see, that is not the case with the theme I downloaded.

Looks like some great resources guys, but a little more information would be invaluable. Can't wait to try some of these out for some quick sites though :)

I did some poking around, and the license information can be found here: http://www.blacktie.co/about-themes/

It uses the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.

Creative Commons are not supposed to be used for code, they say that themselves.

Right, but for the purposes of legal actions, CSS and HTML templates are probably more like media then like code.

Am I the only one who never care about licenses? It says "free" so I download it. What is the worst thing that can happen?

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

Yeah some not-so-diligent person added some "free" code to our commercial, closed-source application.

"Free" as in GPL2.

Ripped that out pretty quickly.

Did you 'rip it out' in the sense of rolling back the commit, or did you refactor the code (and replace the GPL2 code with code that did the same/similar thing)?

If it were the latter, would your entire codebase be considered a derivative work (just as if I took some GPL2 code and refactored it until all the original code was gone)?

For some reason, I had never read the GNU definition of free software. Very interesting thanks!

One question though, did I understand it correctly or have a got it wrong:

I can make a free software (free as in speech), and charge you X amount of money for it, but it is within your right to sell it to the next person as long as you keep the freedom to modify etc?

You can get sued.

"Free" for what? You need a license because you want to know exactly what you can and can't do, especially if you are a company. And it better be a well known license, that has stood in trial.

The worst thing that can happen is going to jail or having to repair whatever damage they claim you have caused. Though it's very unlikely in your case and for this library.

As an individual with personal projects, probably nothing bad will ever happen even if you mangle licenses to their fullest extent.

The issue becomes when you then decide to build something commercial with photos/libraries/etc that have non-commercial/attribution features to them. If I wanted to use this theme to build a Startup, it could become very enticing to companies to target litigation against me. Above and beyond litigation, it could be a PR nightmare if press found out I had built something on top of code that I wasn't allowed to use. Think of all the questions it would raise -- well if he used non-commercial code commercially, what if he had stolen code from other places?

It also lends a sense of credibility to the project/photo/download in that the author thought about the way that his creation was to be used. We used a "free" open source iPhone mockup that seemed perfectly legitimate, and implemented it into one of our client's websites. A few months later, Getty Images had detected that a commercial copyrighted image had been used in the background of the iPhone mockup and sent a litigation letter to our client demanding payment. It was an expensive lesson for us to learn that just because something says it's one thing doesn't mean we can take them at their word.

No license is bad. If code (or any other IP) has no license, it's fully protected by default and you can't use it safely.

same thing happened to me, for some odd reason this site came off as sketchy to me - I even whoisd her which didnt help matters much. Is it just me or do others have profound mistrust for domains that don't reveal their identity?

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