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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

#211

Post by CyberRabbi »

shkkmo wrote: post #210
CyberRabbi wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> How exactly would that happen? > How it always happens? How much time have you spend in multi-lingual contexts? How do you think creols and slang develope? Language naturally evolves to fit the needs of people who use it. This is a failure to demonstrate how promoting language standards may result in increased discrimination. Again, whether a language standard is promoted or not, people will discriminate against o…

> This is a failure to demonstrate how promoting language standards may result in increased discrimination. It does that right now, no "may" about it. > Again, whether a language standard is promoted or not, people will discriminate against others who differ from them. "Promoted" is a too nice a word when the reality is that the standard is used limit the opportunities of people who don't follow the standard. > You a…

>> This is a failure to demonstrate how promoting language standards may result in increased discrimination.

> It does that right now, no "may" about it.

If language standards indeed cause discrimination, please demonstrate how. Otherwise this is a baseless claim.

> I've literally had people tell that they assume someone is stupider if they use the "me" instead of "I" in an "and" clause.

So you think if a standard English did not exist, then people would no longer judge others who speak differently from them as stupid?

> A good language standard would be determined inclusive organization that is representative of all its speakers, would be a living standard that changes as the underlying language and it's dialects change (i.e descriptive), and would understood as common reference point for communication rather than as the one correct way of using that language ( i.e. not proscriptive).

Right so you support the idea of a language standard, likely for all the benefits I’ve listed, except when people use them to make other people feel bad. Just a note to everyone reading this: the subject of making people feel bad is a social phenomenon that is entirely orthogonal to whether or not a language standard is “proscriptive.” The term he is looking for is “normative” and all standards, language or not, must be normative to a degree.

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

#212

Post by [deleted] »

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?

[deleted]

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

#213

Post by ryan_lane »

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 issue here is that you're a well-poisoner, putting out code that can't be used, as a joke, while also making a popular blog post and making the software easy to use as a library. Now that it's being used, it's also hard for folks to remove your library and implement something similar without it being considered a derivative.

Sure, it's funny, but it's a joke at the expense of everyone else. This is like going to a party and walking up to every person and making a joke at their expense. Were the jokes funny? Maybe. Does everything think you're an asshole? Almost certainly.

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

#214

Post by shkkmo »

CyberRabbi wrote: post #211
shkkmo wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a failure to demonstrate how promoting language standards may result in increased discrimination. It does that right now, no "may" about it. > Again, whether a language standard is promoted or not, people will discriminate against others who differ from them. "Promoted" is a too nice a word when the reality is that the standard is used limit the opportunities of people who don't follow the standard. > You a…

>> This is a failure to demonstrate how promoting language standards may result in increased discrimination. > It does that right now, no "may" about it. If language standards indeed cause discrimination, please demonstrate how. Otherwise this is a baseless claim. > I've literally had people tell that they assume someone is stupider if they use the "me" instead of "I" in an "and" clause. So you think if a standard En…

> If language standards indeed cause discrimination, please demonstrate how. Otherwise this is a baseless claim.

That wasn't my claim. My claim was that prescriptive approaches to language facilitate and magnify discrimination and have historically frequently been used to justify and enforce discrimination. You can look at how regional UK dialects affect employability and education outcomes. You can look at the way speakers of the ebonics dialect have been forces to learn to change not just their dialect but their accent to get jobs. There is such a wealth of examples of the roles that language plays in descrimination that suggesting otherwise seems odd to me.

> So you think if a standard English did not exist, then people would no longer judge others who speak differently from them as stupid?

I think if we encouraged people to gain more exposure to other dialects in school and didn't teach people that those dialects are wrong then there would be less judging of people based on how they speak rather than what they are saying.

> Right so you support the idea of a language standard, likely for all the benefits I’ve listed, except when people use them to make other people feel bad.

That is not what I said. I might support a standard, depending on how that standard is determined, how it is promoted and how flexible it is to change.

My concerns with linguistic standards has nothing to do with "making people feel bad" and everything to do with denying opportunities to people. I've stated this repeatedly so I'm not sure why this isn't getting through...

> The term he is looking for is “normative” and all standards, language or not, must be normative to a degree.

No, the term is the one I used originally but then mistyped in my last response "prescriptive" ("proscriptive" is the opposite, telling people what not to do rather than what what to do.)

"Normative" and "prescriptive" are similar but distinct terms. When you tell people how to speak, that is prescriptive, when you judge people based on how they speak, that is normative. So in my view, prescriptive linguistics encourages normative behaviors around language.

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

#215

Post by inopinatus »

JackFr wrote: post #32
inopinatus wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite so. As written, it's a null statement. To be enforceable, a license has to be written by one party such that another party may acquire rights in exchange for accepting the terms. This is how licenses become contracts. Simply reading the words "Don't use it" does not bind you, because there is no grant of use; there is no offer or exchange of value, so no contract has been formed, and the statement is at best ad…

As pointed out in other comments, music and drama are exceptions to this where their ‘use’ is protected by copyright. You can read a play aloud if you like, but you can’t perform it publicly without permission (or royalties).

That's the typical outcome, but not by exception to this analysis; if a work of music or drama included an equally poorly worded "license", then the rights and obligations of all parties would similarly fall back to the terms of service of the platform through which the work was acquired, with a backstop of the Berne Convention, TRIPS agreement, TPPT, and various EU directives (or rather more specifically, the local implementation of those, assuming your jurisdiction is a signatory to any).

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

#216

Post by philipswood »

Fuzzeh wrote: post #140
philipswood wrote: post #2

Quite an unusual, but effective, way to mark something as a proof of concept that's dangerous to use: From [1]: "This is as unsafe as it sounds and I don't recommend anyone do it outside of a testing environment." [1]: https://github.com/bouk/monkey#i-thought-that-monkeypatching...

You don't have the right to use it, even in a testing environment. The license denys you the right to use it.

Yes, but at the same time demonstrates the code clearly so you could implement it yourself. I'd say this is code sharing aiming at zero reuse.

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

#217

Post by inopinatus »

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?

No. It's probably intended satirically, but in practice it's a null statement since there's no grant of anything nor an exchange of value. It's equivalent to the default of "All rights reserved". This includes any fair use rights you might have, however, and any rights due to Github's ToS, so you can likely review and discuss the code, and quote from it, but if incorporated into a product or service then it's actionable; the author has the option of asserting their rights.

There's no assertion that the method is patented so you'd probably be free to also use the technique, as long as you don't reuse or incorporate the original work. If your code consequently looks like the author's then that's usually fine too, c.f. NEC v. Intel (1989), although actually relying on this precedent is a question balancing your access to legal resources vs how much the author really gives a shit.

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

#218

Post by profmonocle »

R0b0t1 wrote: post #195
jopsen wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no lawyer, but don't you usually have to show damages?

Damages would be loss of revenue. He was deprived of the ability to negotiate terms of use for payment. This is why the GPL is more developer friendly than other licenses. If a business doesn't like the GPL you can offer to relicense your code, ... for money. And money is the restitution you seek when the license is violated.

I'm curious how damages would be calculated in a case like this. Obviously you can't get away with saying "I would have charged them $10 billion for this code, so that's what they should owe me." But on the flipside, should they be able to say they wouldn't have been willing to pay anything for it, therefore they owe zero?

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

#219

Post by laurent92 »

robocat wrote: post #194
nzmsv wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of legal departments have a mental image of AGPL (and GPL) as a bogeyman that will steal all the company's code if allowed anywhere near the building. I've sat through a presentation one time that tried to paint these licenses as something only basement dwellers use for personal projects. I spoke to the presenter afterwards and told them about projects like Linux and Mongo, and how even AGPL is not as scary as…

My personal experience as a developer and owner is that it is very difficult and time consuming to understand the risks and to comprehend the *GPL licences. For example, using an LGPL based JavaScript library just leaves me confused every time. I read the LGPL 3.0, read some stack overflow answers, and read the GNU website. Yet I am left without being 100% certain that I can minify the LGPL JavaScript into a single f…

There was a funny Microsoft license for Xlsx.js (a lib that read Excel files in browser): It was allowed to distribute freely… as long as it runs on Windows:

> (F) Platform Limitation- The licenses granted in sections 2(A) & 2(B) extend only to the software or derivative works that (1) are run on a Microsoft Windows operating system product, and (2) are not Excluded Products.

So you could not deliver it on Safari, but also not on Chrome if it ran on Mac.

Aaaand that is why the JSXLSX implementation was developed, exactly the same as xlsx.js but without the restriction.

https://github.com/stephen-hardy/xlsx.js/issues/8

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

#220

Post by bouk »

rob wrote: post #154
user5994461 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

update: hit the jackpot the library is currently in use by Heroku/SalesForce to build deploy java apps (or something like that) https://github.com/heroku/java-buildpack/blob/master/go.mod I wonder what sort of settlement you could get if you were to send them a lawyer for real.

Welcome to America in one sentence.

I really don't understand this way of thinking
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