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Project includes a dependancy that has a license that forbids its use

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Re: Project includes a dependancy that has a license that forbids its use

#71

Post by akiselev »

bouk wrote: post #41
nextaccountic wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems that you're not interested in suing anyone over this. However, you still don't give people permission to use, not even in small throwaway tests. Which is fair. But your blog post[0] language suggests that you are okay with and even incentivizes people trying this out (even if trying it out might be technically illegal, because it infringes your rights). I think you should have mentioned something about the l…

Pretty funny right?

Has anyone ever tested in court whether a license has to be made in good faith to be binding?

Re: Project includes a dependancy that has a license that forbids its use

#72

Post by kook_throwaway »

dahart wrote: post #44
bouk wrote: post #25

I love that all the discussion here is about the license I wrote and not about the actual project, which is a completely terrible idea and something I created as a lark. Why did I not spell this out in the blog post? For my own amusement. I also think it shows that licenses really don't matter all that much as some people think, they are not computer code.

The blog post and the README both seem to encourage use of the project. And a license that prevents all use including personal is very rare and not exactly in the spirit of GitHub. So I’m curious why both the blog and your README don’t mention explicitly that you don’t want allow use or explain why. Would it be worth putting something at the top of the README?

OP said: "I also think it shows that licenses really don't matter all that much as some people think". I doubt they would be unable to sleep at night because of a license violation.

Re: Project includes a dependancy that has a license that forbids its use

#73

Post by woodruffw »

wheybags wrote: post #47

Side note, but for all the people saying this is absolutely godawful and the license is OK because no one in their right mind would use it in production, this project from MS does basically the same thing: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/detours/ Recently open sourced, but has been used for twenty years in real products from MS and others. It's not so crazy as you might think! An example of a real us…

The key difference being that Detours is a library written by Microsoft engineers with access to the Win32 team and the ability (if not drive) to ensure that Detours functions correctly as changes are made. Those changes are also probably pretty rare, given Win32’s famously stable ABI.

This library patches a third party runtime, one that explicitly forbids this kind of instrumentation and has a famously unstable ABI.

You can do whatever you want to get your job done, and this is certainly one way to do it, but it’s absolutely a dangerous hack.

Re: Project includes a dependancy that has a license that forbids its use

#74

Post by jamesjansson »

bouk wrote: post #41
nextaccountic wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems that you're not interested in suing anyone over this. However, you still don't give people permission to use, not even in small throwaway tests. Which is fair. But your blog post[0] language suggests that you are okay with and even incentivizes people trying this out (even if trying it out might be technically illegal, because it infringes your rights). I think you should have mentioned something about the l…

Pretty funny right?

No, don't screw around with people legally. It makes you look dishonest.

Re: Project includes a dependancy that has a license that forbids its use

#75

Post by Shank »

llimos wrote: post #69
gpas wrote: post #13

From the explaining blog post [0] > If you’re not interested in how it works and you just want to do monkey patching, then you can find the library here. Also > Wrapping it up in a nice library > I took the above code and put it in an easy to use library. It supports 32 bit, reversing patches, and patching instance methods. I wrote a couple of examples and put those in the README. Then in the README[1]: > Make sure y…

Presumably revision 697673d58359af7ebdcad66f99b81d011359d8ef and earlier is perfectly fine to use, lacking a LICENSE.txt and with the README encouraging use

If no license is present, the default is actually “all rights reserved.” This is the same level of restriction.

https://choosealicense.com/no-permission/

Re: Project includes a dependancy that has a license that forbids its use

#76

Post by seppoonbi3 »

foreigner wrote: post #28

This is just mean! The documentation definitely reads like the library is meant for use, but the author forbids all use in the license.

It is clearly meant for use. Those two things are not in contradiction and it's quite often that good software is spoiled with bad license. If you have to know, the secret is not to respect the made up license. Pls give downvote, copying is stealing.

Re: Project includes a dependancy that has a license that forbids its use

#77

Post by jkaplowitz »

akiselev wrote: post #71
bouk wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty funny right?

Has anyone ever tested in court whether a license has to be made in good faith to be binding?

Well, if it isn't binding, then there's no right to reuse it (beyond certain fair use exceptions) under the copyright law that applies by default.

For me the question is whether the misleading blog post would be found by a court to be an implicit license separate from the one in the codebase. My guess is that it would depend on several factors including the specific circumstances of the accused infringer and the specifics of contract/copyright law in the relevant jurisdiction, but probably at least sometimes yes.

Re: Project includes a dependancy that has a license that forbids its use

#78

Post by nextaccountic »

jkaplowitz wrote: post #77
akiselev wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has anyone ever tested in court whether a license has to be made in good faith to be binding?

Well, if it isn't binding, then there's no right to reuse it (beyond certain fair use exceptions) under the copyright law that applies by default. For me the question is whether the misleading blog post would be found by a court to be an implicit license separate from the one in the codebase. My guess is that it would depend on several factors including the specific circumstances of the accused infringer and the spec…

TIL something can be implicitly licensed. Well the term is implied license https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implied_license

Re: Project includes a dependancy that has a license that forbids its use

#79

Post by Filligree »

bscphil wrote: post #54
semitones wrote: post #4

License reads: > "Copyright Bouke van der Bijl I do not give anyone permissions to use this tool for any purpose. Don't use it. I’m not interested in changing this license. Please don’t ask. " Used by counter on GitHub is at 464. The way it's worded would imply that they are all violating the license? How can this be enforced for inconsequential small pet projects? Is this really something to worry about, particularl…

> Used by counter on GitHub is at 464. The way it's worded would imply that they are all violating the license? Yes. My read of the situation is not that it's a license that intends to stop people from using it, but rather that it's a license that selects for a specific target audience that doesn't care about copyrights or is anti-copyright. In my opinion, that's a perfectly valid audience to select for, although a l…

I’m anti-copyright.

I still wouldn’t use this code, because I don’t want to break the law. Being anti-copyright doesn’t mean you also need to be against due process.

Re: Project includes a dependancy that has a license that forbids its use

#80

Post by Filligree »

avodonosov wrote: post #66

Is the "I do not give anyone permissions to use this tool for any purpose. Don't use it." actually a forbidding, strictly speaking?

The default is that you’re not allowed to use it. There needs to be an explicit grant of license to change that, and there’s not.
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