4 ms·

If you were claiming that your project was free and open source on the front page, that would be very misleading and dangerous for software engineers at a compa

by WWLink 3y ago

If you were claiming that your project was free and open source on the front page, that would be very misleading and dangerous for software engineers at a company who may inadvertently use your code at their job in a professional manner and then get their employer sued for violating the terms of the license. I'm not sure how well that would hold up in court, because every other "free for non-commercial use" license I've seen was VERY up-front about that and had some call-out for professional-use license pricing. Using dubious marketing for a software product that isn't free for all uses would only tarnish the reputation of open source projects that ARE free. Eventually you get a company where someone was familiar with a lawsuit and makes a rule where using open source code is forbidden. Is that the path you want to go down?

drewcoo 3y ago
> that would be very misleading and dangerous for software engineers at a company who may inadvertently use your code at their job in a professional manner and then get their employer sued for violating the terms of the license So there's another point of confusion/disagreement. I don't recall open source ever meaning "no restrictions." Copyleft, for example, is OSS with the restriction that any future use must also be OSS and copyleft.
JohnFen 3y ago
> software engineers at a company who may inadvertently use your code at their job in a professional manner and then get their employer sued for violating the terms of the license. Every place I've ever worked treats OSS in exactly the same way as closed-source software. You don't get to just use it based on your own judgement as a dev. You have to request to use it, which involves providing the license it is under to legal and getting their approval. In most cases, legal will require a commercial license to be purchased if that's an option (even for OSS) because they value the legal certainty more than the cost of the commercial license.

by WWLink 3y ago

drewcoo 3y ago

> that would be very misleading and dangerous for software engineers at a company who may inadvertently use your code at their job in a professional manner and then get their employer sued for violating the terms of the license So there's another point of confusion/disagreement. I don't recall open source ever meaning "no restrictions." Copyleft, for example, is OSS with the restriction that any future use must also be OSS and copyleft.

JohnFen 3y ago

> software engineers at a company who may inadvertently use your code at their job in a professional manner and then get their employer sued for violating the terms of the license. Every place I've ever worked treats OSS in exactly the same way as closed-source software. You don't get to just use it based on your own judgement as a dev. You have to request to use it, which involves providing the license it is under to legal and getting their approval. In most cases, legal will require a commercial license to be purchased if that's an option (even for OSS) because they value the legal certainty more than the cost of the commercial license.