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LICENSE: _may be_ licensed to use source code; incorrect license grant

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Re: LICENSE: _may be_ licensed to use source code; incorrect license grant

#51

Post by fhdkweig »

throwaway150 wrote: post #40
Fnoord wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It used to be like that, yes. If you didn't mention the license, it was in public domain. Those times are long gone though.

> If you didn't mention the license, it was in public domain. I don't think this has ever been the case. If a license is not mentioned, it is always "All rights reserved" by the authors of the project, by the Berne convention (1886).

While I don't know if license and copyright are the same thing, the film Night of the Living Dead was famously accidentally added to the public domain due to a forgotten copyright notice.

Re: LICENSE: _may be_ licensed to use source code; incorrect license grant

#53

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

michaelt wrote: post #16

To me, this seems kinda reasonable. The reality is licenses are all nonsense and none of it makes any sense. There could be secret patents nobody knows about. That precise wording written by American lawyers might not hold up in Chinese courts. There might be two compatible licenses, but one is 20x the length of the other; obviously some legal expert thought those extra words were needed - but are they? What's going…

Restrictions like this, where your code is only available for use for certain purposes by certain kinds of users, are explicitly rejected by both the open source and free software movements. If a developer wants to license their code this way, they should admit that what they're building is not an open source platform. Then they can simply use one of the licenses like CC NC or SSPL that are designed for that purpose, instead of trying to stitch together an unfree license out of a bunch of free ones.

Re: LICENSE: _may be_ licensed to use source code; incorrect license grant

#54

Post by pixelpoet »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #6

I'm already shutting down my private instance of Mattermost, no thank you. I'm thinking of Zulip, at least they aren't pulling this shenanigans.

I run a Zulip server and it's pretty good. The way they organise channels is extremely convoluted unfortunately (I wish they would just use absolutely standard channels layout like every other chat, and have everyone able to see them on join!) but well, beggars can't be choosers.

Re: LICENSE: _may be_ licensed to use source code; incorrect license grant

#55

Post by gowld »

u1hcw9nx wrote: post #42

Not clarifying is the right thing to do. If the license is unclear, it should be fixed by a lawyer who knows what they are doing. Nobody else in the company should try to explain what the license actually means. Trying to explain a license creates informal interpretations and a legal paper trail that can confuse things even more and be used against the company later. It can even create a new contract under some juris…

> If the license is unclear, it should be fixed by a lawyer who knows what they are doing.

It's been 7 years and not fixed, apparently.

Re: LICENSE: _may be_ licensed to use source code; incorrect license grant

#56

Post by u1hcw9nx »

paxys wrote: post #50
u1hcw9nx wrote: post #42

Not clarifying is the right thing to do. If the license is unclear, it should be fixed by a lawyer who knows what they are doing. Nobody else in the company should try to explain what the license actually means. Trying to explain a license creates informal interpretations and a legal paper trail that can confuse things even more and be used against the company later. It can even create a new contract under some juris…

If the license has been unclear for 8 years and the company hasn't bothered to get a lawyer to fix it then the "I'm just an engineer and don't know about this stuff" excuse doesn't apply. It's obvious that they are deliberately keeping the license vague and confusing to scare users into paying for a commercial edition while also calling their product "open source" for marketing purposes.

As I said, nobody should touch unclear license.

Just forget the company and software, there is no reason to bitch about it. 7 years is too long to fix.

Re: LICENSE: _may be_ licensed to use source code; incorrect license grant

#57

Post by gowld »

ggm wrote: post #2

> at this time we are not entertaining any changes as such. Always wonder what leads people to write like this. What does "as such" add to the sentence? At least "at this time" is temporally conditional to the future, it has purpose. Entertaining is posh "thinking about" or "interested in" so had the merit of being one word in place of two but so is "considering" Are we not entertained?

Are you asking why the person who published code with an ambiguous license also answers questions ambiguously?

Re: LICENSE: _may be_ licensed to use source code; incorrect license grant

#60

Post by jeltz »

u1hcw9nx wrote: post #56
paxys wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the license has been unclear for 8 years and the company hasn't bothered to get a lawyer to fix it then the "I'm just an engineer and don't know about this stuff" excuse doesn't apply. It's obvious that they are deliberately keeping the license vague and confusing to scare users into paying for a commercial edition while also calling their product "open source" for marketing purposes.

As I said, nobody should touch unclear license. Just forget the company and software, there is no reason to bitch about it. 7 years is too long to fix.

No, it is great that people bitch about it. These companies need to be called out and shamed. Now I know that I will not waste time evaluating Mattermost.
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