Indeed they are not a lawyer. A lawyer would know that this is not illegal. It violates the rights of the copyright holder, but that’s not a crime.
This Program is Illegally Packaged in 14 Distributions
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Re: This Program is Illegally Packaged in 14 Distributions
#12This reads like an old lady harping over nothing consequence. Did the author of TFA try to contact the Gentoo folks about this discrepancy before writing this incendiary blog post assuming negative/incompetent/ignorant intent? People are doing their level best to be respectful of other's wishes, but it's tough to account for every edge case. Is the author of the unlicensed code upset? It doesn't seem so. Why not be p…
I think we read a different article. How I read it: The author is surprised that when packaging their program for Gentoo; they discovered (while following the licensing guidelines) that there was a dependency in their chain that had no license, which makes the result not open source. Gentoos packaging guidelines aren't arbitrary when it comes to licensing, they're precisely right that statically linked binaries are l…
To add, as the article says, the GH issue[0] was posted on Dec 18, 2020 by Norwin @noerw who is a member of the Gitea GitHub organization[1], so Gitea is definitely well-intentioned on clarifying the license of code it uses.
Re: This Program is Illegally Packaged in 14 Distributions
#13Indeed they are not a lawyer. A lawyer would know that this is not illegal. It violates the rights of the copyright holder, but that’s not a crime.
edit: I stand corrected
Re: This Program is Illegally Packaged in 14 Distributions
#14At least it's just unlicensed, not something worse like AGPL /s
Yes, it's a joke and it's funny when several companies, including Google [1] are very scared of that license.
[1] https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/using/agpl...
Re: This Program is Illegally Packaged in 14 Distributions
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think we read a different article. How I read it: The author is surprised that when packaging their program for Gentoo; they discovered (while following the licensing guidelines) that there was a dependency in their chain that had no license, which makes the result not open source. Gentoos packaging guidelines aren't arbitrary when it comes to licensing, they're precisely right that statically linked binaries are l…
Revision: thanks for the feedback, I'm going to bed. Goodnight HN friends!
I read it the same way as dijit. I would also add that it’s an interesting view into how licensing is supposed to be declared in modern Linux distributions and what happens when that breaks a little bit. I‘be only lightly used Linux since somewhere around 2002, mostly Raspbian, so it may not be as interesting to others?
Re: This Program is Illegally Packaged in 14 Distributions
#16This reads like an old lady harping over nothing consequence. Did the author of TFA try to contact the Gentoo folks about this discrepancy before writing this incendiary blog post assuming negative/incompetent/ignorant intent? People are doing their level best to be respectful of other's wishes, but it's tough to account for every edge case. Is the author of the unlicensed code upset? It doesn't seem so. Why not be p…
Last time I saw such disregard for software licenses, it was packaged up and branded as GitHub Copilot.
Re: This Program is Illegally Packaged in 14 Distributions
#17Indeed they are not a lawyer. A lawyer would know that this is not illegal. It violates the rights of the copyright holder, but that’s not a crime.
I'm not sure if you mean in this specific case or in general, but in general, copyright infringement certainly can be criminal. Willful infringement for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain, for example, is a criminal offense in the United States (17 USC 506).
Re: This Program is Illegally Packaged in 14 Distributions
#18Author of ripgrep here.
Maybe, umm, don't depend on auto-detection tools as the ultimate source of whether something is appropriately licensed or not? encoding_rs is clearly licensed, otherwise I wouldn't have used it in ripgrep: https://github.com/hsivonen/encoding_rs
Take it up with the auto-detection tools. Or at least do your due diligence before claiming ripgrep is using "unlicensed" code.
The Debian copyright notice is correct for ripgrep.
Re: This Program is Illegally Packaged in 14 Distributions
#19Re: This Program is Illegally Packaged in 14 Distributions
#20Indeed they are not a lawyer. A lawyer would know that this is not illegal. It violates the rights of the copyright holder, but that’s not a crime.
You make it sound like copyright infringement is never a crime, when that isn't true at all. 18 U.S.C. § 2319.
Now, the commercial use or intent of the software in question isn't analyzed in the OP (or in your comment) and I haven't dug into it. In this particular case it may or may not meet the elements of the five-year federal felony. But your comment is far too quick to dismiss the possibility.
(Additionally, as a sibling comment pointed out, the word "illegal" doesn't always necessarily mean "criminal.")