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Oh, so I can decompile Minecraft, make a bunch of my own changes, change the name (to avoid trademark issues) and then sell the result? Can you point me in the

by mort96 4y ago

Oh, so I can decompile Minecraft, make a bunch of my own changes, change the name (to avoid trademark issues) and then sell the result? Can you point me in the direction of a license or other legal document which grants me these rights? That's what it means for something to be open source as opposed to source-available after all.

MagicMoonlight 4y ago
You can’t do that on open source projects… that’s called stealing. Licenses basically never allow anything like that.
- mort96 4y ago
  They ... do let you do that. Being able to make changes to the code and redistribute your changes is literally the whole point of open source, and the popular licenses don't contain restrictions on making money (nor could they, if they want to fit the Open Source Initiative's definition of open source). The permissive open-source licenses (MIT, BSD, ...) let you just take the code, make whatever changes you want, package it up into some proprietary product, and sell that product. The only requirements are usually that you maintain some attribution notice. The MIT license, for example, says this: "Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software". The copyleft licenses (GPL, LGPL, ...) lets you take the code, make whatever changes you want, package it up into some product, and sell that product; but you need to provide your product's source code to your customers. Show me an open source license which prohibits me from taking the source code and selling a product based on it.
- _piif 4y ago
  The commonly used licenses like GPL and MIT don't put any restrictions on commercial use granted you don't break any of the conditions and limitations. Theoretically you could even just take any software using any of those licenses, optionally package it up and then commercially redistribute it as is and it would not breach the license. Needless to say people probably wouldn't look at you favorably in that case though.

by mort96 4y ago

MagicMoonlight 4y ago

You can’t do that on open source projects… that’s called stealing. Licenses basically never allow anything like that.

mort96 4y ago
They ... do let you do that. Being able to make changes to the code and redistribute your changes is literally the whole point of open source, and the popular licenses don't contain restrictions on making money (nor could they, if they want to fit the Open Source Initiative's definition of open source). The permissive open-source licenses (MIT, BSD, ...) let you just take the code, make whatever changes you want, package it up into some proprietary product, and sell that product. The only requirements are usually that you maintain some attribution notice. The MIT license, for example, says this: "Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software". The copyleft licenses (GPL, LGPL, ...) lets you take the code, make whatever changes you want, package it up into some product, and sell that product; but you need to provide your product's source code to your customers. Show me an open source license which prohibits me from taking the source code and selling a product based on it.
_piif 4y ago
The commonly used licenses like GPL and MIT don't put any restrictions on commercial use granted you don't break any of the conditions and limitations. Theoretically you could even just take any software using any of those licenses, optionally package it up and then commercially redistribute it as is and it would not breach the license. Needless to say people probably wouldn't look at you favorably in that case though.