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I'm not who you are replying to, but am a contributor since the v1 ish days and will try to remain respectful, as I feel you usually are. It feels the main inf

I'm not who you are replying to, but am a contributor since the v1 ish days and will try to remain respectful, as I feel you usually are. It feels the main inflammatory issue pointed out is 'bought' vs 'agreed to take over.' It is an important distinction, but to the end user the result is the same. Many have lamented a noticeably degraded experience. I'm curious if the original maintainer would have agreed to such action(in fairness, it doesn't matter, just wondering). Further, many have expressed their distaste with the banner. I don't want to rehash or argue that here, and probably you don't either. FWIW, I'm just a passive observer and never argued one way or another. However, I'm not sure just ignoring folks is the right answer either. One can see how both changes could lead to a lot of dissatisfaction, I think. All of that aside, the legal issue described is a real double edged sword. It feels like G only blesses certain licenses to an end user. I have some trouble believing a company of Google's size worries about the implication of what boils down to analyzing publicly available data. Does Google check for and bless licenses in their web crawler?

rsc 5y ago
As far as blessing certain licenses, I believe that we currently recognize all the OSI and SPDX licenses and display documentation for code with any license that permits commercial use. The full list is at https://pkg.go.dev/license-policy https://pkg.go.dev/license-policy. Analyzing public data is different from reproducing and distributing significant portions. The problem here is reproduction and distribution. Legally, Google's short search result snippets, which quote just a few fragments of a page, are quite different from reproducing and distributing a package's docs in their entirety. https://opensource.google/docs/using/license/ https://opensource.google/docs/using/license/ is a good overview of what a license needs to do and why. I don't know what to say about the "have some trouble believing" part other than to attest that I have personally spent many hours working with (excellent, wonderful) lawyers on these issues. Google really does care about making sure we are respecting the limitations set out in people's licenses.

rsc 5y ago

As far as blessing certain licenses, I believe that we currently recognize all the OSI and SPDX licenses and display documentation for code with any license that permits commercial use. The full list is at https://pkg.go.dev/license-policy https://pkg.go.dev/license-policy. Analyzing public data is different from reproducing and distributing significant portions. The problem here is reproduction and distribution. Legally, Google's short search result snippets, which quote just a few fragments of a page, are quite different from reproducing and distributing a package's docs in their entirety. https://opensource.google/docs/using/license/ https://opensource.google/docs/using/license/ is a good overview of what a license needs to do and why. I don't know what to say about the "have some trouble believing" part other than to attest that I have personally spent many hours working with (excellent, wonderful) lawyers on these issues. Google really does care about making sure we are respecting the limitations set out in people's licenses.