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In an online course recently, one module involved an API with an attribution requirement that neither the instructor nor any student was aware of - they specifi
by Rd6n6 5y ago
In an online course recently, one module involved an API with an attribution requirement that neither the instructor nor any student was aware of - they specifically described it as free use, no attribution required, because they were unaware. Despite there having been more than 20k previous students, I was the first person to mention mention this and link to the clause, and the instructor was surprised.
Almost everybody skips reading the terms and licenses of things
In the chess case, the team probably assumed that open source meant “do whatever you want,” and nobody dug any deeper than that, and now they’re getting sued
Edit: the comments below say that they knew about the license issue for years
- dkural 5y agoThis is entirely inaccurate. Chessbase is a company, and has been well aware of these licensing issues. They've purposefully renamed and scrubbed OS code to sell it for profit and pass it on as their own.
- molticrystal 5y agoJust look in the about/credits link in just about any studio's game or software product and you will see it is standard practice to look over and include licenses as needed of all 3rd party libraries and code bases used in development and credit them as appropriate. While the end user might be sloppy on checking the license aspect, developers certainly are aware at some stage, especially commercial developers by the time they create or modify their about dialog.
- apetresc 5y agoThis is a possibility in general, but not here. Chessbase has a long history with this sort of thing, and they've been called out repeatedly. They've even settled before, if I recall correctly.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ghshephard 5y agoAny company past circa 2002sh or so, and definitely by 2005, is intimately aware of their intellectual property responsibilities, and, it's the opposite problem that I've run into - in which tons of strawmen are thrown up as to the danger of infecting products with open source licenses makes it dangerous to touch the code. One of the reasons why BSD licenses are so attractive to corporations, is that they run the lowest risk. GPLv3 is obviously a non-starter for most companies, with GPLv2 falling somewhere in the middle.
- mehrdada 5y ago> GPLv3 is obviously a non-starter for most companies "Non-starter" is a gross mischaracterization for GPLv3 for most companies, even most software companies, considering there is quite a bit of GPLv3 software in a modern GNU+Linux distro that they likely rely on.
- setpatchaddress 5y agoI think the parent is referring to the code they ship as part of their own products, which for most companies is definitely not GPL3 if they can avoid it.
- ghshephard 5y agoThanks for clarifying that. I'm also definitely referring to the software that companies ship that is not meant to be open source. GPLv2 is mostly safe as long as you don't link to it (Unless its LGPL and you dynamically link). Try and find a single major corporation in the world that is willing to bind it's proprietary intellectual property to GPLv3. It's a tribute, honestly, to that license that most companies realize that they have to go all-in on open-source (at which point GPLv3 is fine)
- matheusmoreira 5y ago> Almost everybody skips reading the terms and licenses of things Yeah, nobody reads this stuff. I've even seen developers fail to understand the implications of the license they're applying to their own code and then get mad when people do things that are allowed. Most people will not actually go to court over any of this stuff either. Surprising to actually see someone getting sued over licenses nobody reads.