Show HN: “Add a License Please” – GitHub Bot
github.com
github.com
I've had to email people before to ask what the license is.
But what exactly is the point of publishing this bot? Do you want multiple people to start running it? Will the bot create multiple automated issues per repo? That sounds like overkill.
Maybe add a note about that.
No. That's why the looping part of the bot isn't published.
Some of that is intentional, some is not.
You may think that everything should include a license, but not everyone shares your sensibilities/values. There are plenty of valid reasons to not include a license, including "I don't want to think about it right now" and "I just don't want to assign a license".
Please don't spam everyone who doesn't agree with you. I hope Github bans this bot.
Likewise, most of it is not intentional and users are just not aware of it. If they do not wish to include a license, they can just close the issue or put a copyright information in the README/wiki.
> Please don't spam everyone who doesn't agree with you. I hope Github bans this bot.
I respect those who don't agree with me. There are a lot of projects that have added licenses already [1] and none have said that they do not want to include licenses (yet).
Also, this is not spam. The bot doesn't scan ALL of the repositories. It only scans repos with 1 to 5 stars. The logic being, if some people "like" it, then it could be a generic project that is reusable. If a lot of people like it then it probably already has a license.
Have a great day!
From a philosophical standpoint, I'd say it's no one's place to be automated cold calling (cold issuing?) other developers to explicitly license their software. If there is no explicit license, the implicit copyright still exists. GitHub is really the only party that would have an understandable role in these kinds of warnings/requests.
Here's a good SX post on the topic: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/148165
Feel free to ask individual repos that you may want to use code from, but unsolicited, automated messaging like this is spam.
If GitHub wanted all the repos on GitHub to have licenses, they would require it, or create a policy where all repos with no licenses automatically meet a minimum licensing requirement.
Except this bot doesn't create PR's.
Going back to other comments, many people store dotfiles on GitHub which aren't likely to have many stars and which would be entirely reasonable to not have a license for.
Moreover, if this bot ever opened an issue on one of my repos for this, I'd flat-out report you to GitHub for harassment if they didn't already beat me to it.
If you want to create a website calling for people to add licenses to their projects and start a movement that way, great. Just tell me where to sign up for the cause. But this is just plain wrong.
Does it or does it not open unsolicited issues on GitHub repositories automatically?
Seems to me like that's exactly what it does. If it does, this is the epitome of spam despite your claim otherwise. Your attitude and apparent disbelief that this would be unwanted and disliked by people is baffling to me. Just look at most comments so far that have felt the same way.
I'm not sure why he thinks it's okay to spam repos with stars, as long as he avoids the ones without stars though?
Aren't all issues unsolicited? The point of creating an issue is to somehow improve the project. If the author overlooked adding a license file, the issue this bot creates will do that. If they really did not mean to add a license, they say so and close the issue. The bot never asks them more than once.
As for people's response, every project owner that has received issues through the bot have either:
- closed the issue without taking any action - added a license file and thanked the bot
Having a publicly exposed issue tracker is soliciting issues. So, except perhaps by exploiting a security flaw related to private repositories, I don't see how it is possible to open unsolicited issues on Github, automatically or otherwise.
If you disagree with the issue, you close it. I don't see what the problem is.
Would it be kosher if I created a bot that created issues for all english-language projects, asking that they be translated to esperanto? No, it wouldn't—it would just be unnecessary spam.