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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

#71

Post by mbauman »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #32
wccrawford wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think about it sounds insane?

It says you "may be licensed" to use the source code under AGPL v3.0, but never actually makes an unambiguous statement that suchandsuch code is licensed under AGPL v3.0. The concept of MIT licensing a compiled software artifact, but not the code used to generate the artifact, is also extremely strange.

Right, the correct way here is to simply grant _everyone_ a license to _everything_ under the terms of the AGPL (or whatever). You can then separately license portions under other terms.

You don't need to note the commercial licensing option in the license itself; it's irrelevant to that grant. You just state that elsewhere.

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

#72

Post by [deleted] »

gowld wrote: post #55
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.

[deleted]

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

#73

Post by zem »

arjie wrote: post #47
lefstathiou wrote: post #28

Someone tried to shake our company down once. They posted all this stock imagery on the web, waited for someone to use it with an ambiguously worded attribution policy, then have a third party chase you down and demand $100k but will settle for $5k. It turns out we did attribute the right way (in our terms of use) and could prove it with logs of when we added the language and when it was removed after we removed the…

Oh that's a classic trick. It's been going on for decades. One example I am particularly familiar with is that of Larry Philpot / User:Nightshooter on Wikimedia Commons. He would upload his photos there with an addendum on how he should be attributed. Any slight impression in the attribution would be followed by legal action. It was obviously a copyright troll mechanism and now all of his photos on Wikimedia Commons…

I am honestly flabbergasted that his pictures weren't expunged with great prejudice. what is the value they add to wikimedia that makes being associated with this sort of sleaze okay?

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

#74

Post by ggm »

1attice wrote: post #5
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?

Well, it means no changes _intended as_ changes [pertaining to the topic at hand]; it implies there may be incidental alterations or differences, eg this issue might be addressed in a blanket legal revamp (whatever that's called) but, at least over this, they aren't pulling over the station wagon to argue with the screaming stakeholders in the back. It's what we used to call "load-bearing vagueness"

> "load-bearing vagueness"

Stealing this. That's ACE!!

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

#75

Post by arjie »

arjie wrote: post #47
lefstathiou wrote: post #28

Someone tried to shake our company down once. They posted all this stock imagery on the web, waited for someone to use it with an ambiguously worded attribution policy, then have a third party chase you down and demand $100k but will settle for $5k. It turns out we did attribute the right way (in our terms of use) and could prove it with logs of when we added the language and when it was removed after we removed the…

Oh that's a classic trick. It's been going on for decades. One example I am particularly familiar with is that of Larry Philpot / User:Nightshooter on Wikimedia Commons. He would upload his photos there with an addendum on how he should be attributed. Any slight impression in the attribution would be followed by legal action. It was obviously a copyright troll mechanism and now all of his photos on Wikimedia Commons…

I was curious about this a few years ago so I took a look around and found another case, the one of Thomas Wolf / User:Der_Wolf_im_Wald, but this guy seems to be getting away with it because he has a 'no-derivatives' box on the image page. He has the same modus operandi:

1. Post the photo to Wikimedia Commons

2. Mark it CC-BY or derivative (say CC-BY-SA etc.)

3. Have a highly precise attribution clause

4. Sue everyone who uses it without the specific attribution

The funny thing about this copyleft troll is that Someone Who Is Not Him creates accounts on Reddit (e.g. this one[0]) that post exclusively about how they made a mistake and the photographer was well within his rights to sue and you should take him very seriously and negotiate the amount.

> We actually violated copyright law before he wrote to us. So it was our mistake and we apologized for that.

I really should create a List page for this on my personal wiki so I can remember all these guys. I find this kind of behavior galling.

People did bring up this stuff here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Der_Wolf_im_Wal.....

But since I don't speak German well enough and inevitably this is going to end up in such a situation where you have to, I think it best I don't pursue deletion here. Hopefully a German speaker will see fit, referencing the other cases here.

0: https://www.reddit.com/user/No_Significance7032/

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

#76

Post by ggm »

whatshisface wrote: post #65
gowld wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Are you asking why the person who indirectly implied a question about the meaning of an ambiguous statement would leave it to the subtext to suggest they suspected that the unclear motive of the author of an ambiguous license was to leave some room for interpretation?

Not as such, no. But I would entertain making a claim I was, should I become sufficiently enthused.

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

#77

Post by leoedin »

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.

I really don’t think it’s unclear. The use of “you may be … in one of two ways” is unambiguous. The fact someone opened an issue is evidence that one person was confused by it, but we don’t know anything about that person. They may not be a native speaker of English. Or they might be trying to pick a fight because the licensing terms don’t agree with their viewpoint.

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

#79

Post by throwaway150 »

fhdkweig wrote: post #51
throwaway150 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Wow. I didn't know that. Looks like this is a very US thing. I looked up now and TIL that US adopted the Berne convention as late as 1989. I'm surprised. So this movie released in 1966 didn't have default "all rights reserved" due to Berne convention. But most European countries, like 80%, had adopted the Berne convention by 1925. So when software was developed in Europe they automatically got "all rights reserved".

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

#80

Post by madeofpalk »

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…

Isn’t the right thing to do is for “the company” to clarify the license it offers its software and code under?

I think we understand that random devs on GitHub aren’t the right ones to resolve it, but I find it hard to believe the correct response is for the company to do nothing.

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