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I looked at it a few weeks back and it's really strange. It has really weird restrictions that don't make any sense regarding the license - I'm not even sure if

I looked at it a few weeks back and it's really strange. It has really weird restrictions that don't make any sense regarding the license - I'm not even sure if they even are legal. The author claims he is sharing the source but that nobody else can fork it, unless they fork it on GitHub?! I don't know if the wording is legalease enough to be enforced, but of course a license like this is legal. Just because you can see the source code doesn't automatically grant you any privileges with it. He is saying he is only allowing unmodified redistribution. With an exception that you are allowed to distribute a modified version of the source code for the sole purpose of submitting a pull request. One problem he might get into is if accepts non-trivial pull requests, then the contributors copyright would come into play, and things could get hairy.

jcranmer 5y ago
The first two clauses of the license are the BSD-2-Clause license, nothing weird or unusual there. The third clause is... interesting. I suspect it's probably legal, but it may well have unintended consequences because it appears to be requiring you to use a trademark. The fourth clause may fall afoul of First Sale Doctrine. It's something that I wouldn't trust without talking to an IP lawyer to work out what it actually means and how much is actually viable to be done in an open source license. The fifth clause is nullified by the terms of GitHub, I think, as GitHub's ToS seems to require you to allow anyone to fork your repository without encumbrance, which the fifth clause tries to narrow.
- dec0dedab0de 5y ago
  The fourth clause may fall afoul of First Sale Doctrine. It's something that I wouldn't trust without talking to an IP lawyer to work out what it actually means and how much is actually viable to be done in an open source license. I don't think the first sale doctrine comes in to play here at all. If we make it physical media for arguments sake. First sale doctrine would say that if a user bought a cartridge of the game they could resell that cartridge. That is not the same thing as redistribution which would be the equivalent of copying the game to new cartridges and selling those. Also, this is definitely not an Open Source license. However, it is similar to the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license. The fifth clause is nullified by the terms of GitHub, I think, as GitHub's ToS seems to require you to allow anyone to fork your repository without encumbrance, which the fifth clause tries to narrow. I'm pretty sure the terms of a website can't overrule the license of the software. I think at best it could get the project kicked off of github, and make it hard to prosecute someone who didn't realize. His biggest problem is use of the word fork when he really meant derivative work. Which comes down to my point that the goal of the license is legal, but maybe not the wording.

jcranmer 5y ago

The first two clauses of the license are the BSD-2-Clause license, nothing weird or unusual there. The third clause is... interesting. I suspect it's probably legal, but it may well have unintended consequences because it appears to be requiring you to use a trademark. The fourth clause may fall afoul of First Sale Doctrine. It's something that I wouldn't trust without talking to an IP lawyer to work out what it actually means and how much is actually viable to be done in an open source license. The fifth clause is nullified by the terms of GitHub, I think, as GitHub's ToS seems to require you to allow anyone to fork your repository without encumbrance, which the fifth clause tries to narrow.

dec0dedab0de 5y ago
The fourth clause may fall afoul of First Sale Doctrine. It's something that I wouldn't trust without talking to an IP lawyer to work out what it actually means and how much is actually viable to be done in an open source license. I don't think the first sale doctrine comes in to play here at all. If we make it physical media for arguments sake. First sale doctrine would say that if a user bought a cartridge of the game they could resell that cartridge. That is not the same thing as redistribution which would be the equivalent of copying the game to new cartridges and selling those. Also, this is definitely not an Open Source license. However, it is similar to the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license. The fifth clause is nullified by the terms of GitHub, I think, as GitHub's ToS seems to require you to allow anyone to fork your repository without encumbrance, which the fifth clause tries to narrow. I'm pretty sure the terms of a website can't overrule the license of the software. I think at best it could get the project kicked off of github, and make it hard to prosecute someone who didn't realize. His biggest problem is use of the word fork when he really meant derivative work. Which comes down to my point that the goal of the license is legal, but maybe not the wording.