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Comment by seanewest | Hacker News Reader

I put your code on npm: https://www.npmjs.org/package/quicksort.swift

Edit: ...and then swiftly unpublished. It is unclear to me the legal issues involved in forking and publishing unlicensed gists.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4007674/whats-the-default...

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why would you publish that on npm? i'm not familiar with the ecosystem, is there a precedent for publishing non-js source files on npm?

And why would you claim MIT license on the code which you didn't write and has no license listed?

I think it is good practice to license packages on npm, even when you are not the original author (which is very common on npm).

Well... technically something with no license is the most restrictive form of a license; as-in nobody has the right to use it nor republish it nor modify it. Not being the copyright holder forbids you from assigning a license.

However, for a trivial piece of code as this... it could be argued it's not copyright-able and therefore you are OK... but just be careful in the future.

If it's not copyrightable it's deceptive to add a purported copyright license. If it is, he has no right to relicense it. Either way not a good move.

Actually I just looked the copyright issue up: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4007674/whats-the-default....

Unpublishing!

Again, I dont think a snippet this trivial is subject to copyright... I just wanted to point out you should mind these matters in the future. Besides offending a developer, you could get into some trouble.

Many times I've emailed devs on Github regarding some code they have that I'd like to use part of but they've failed to assign a license. A few time's I've been turned away... but usually the dev just forgot or was not aware others couldn't freely use it.

There is precedence for publishing non-js code on npm: https://github.com/substack/dotc

someone said there is already quicksort in the standard lib... so this code snippet is really only academic...

That looks to be JS code that implements a C preprocessor. And the C code present in it seems to be for demonstrating/testing the preprocessor.

Scroll down to the section "publishing c modules". It advocates publishing dotc modules on npm.

"npm? Isn't that for javascript?

Yes, but:

native node modules are written in c++

npm already exists

npm installs packages in a way that avoids dependency hell"

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