4 ms·

It is a wakeup-call also to do due dilligence and risk management when entering contracts. And yes, clicking "agreed" in the installer is very often a contract

It is a wakeup-call also to do due dilligence and risk management when entering contracts. And yes, clicking "agreed" in the installer is very often a contract that you should run by your legal advisors. Or at least think very hard about. _Some_ kinds of Open Source might help there, since _some_ open source licenses are very easy to comply with and very business-friendly. On the other hand, all the game studios now complaining would also howl and whine when forced to be GPL-compliant and release their source code. And even with business-friendly take-what-you-want-and-never-give-back Open Source licenses, there is always the risk that the project you are using does what Hashicorp did with Terraform and stuff: Change the license for all future releases to something you won't like, cutting you off from your necessary updates and fixes. Maybe there will be a community maintaining a fork, maybe there won't.

TMM2K 3y ago
Godot is MIT licensed though, there's very little we can do to screw our users if we wanted to, which we do not :)
- nhinck 3y ago
  You could change the license for future versions and charge for said updates, for the market that godot targets that would be more a little screwing to them. How long would it take for someone to take over the project (if ever).
  - jehb 3y ago
    And it's at exactly this moment the community would fork the project and development of a free version would continue. This is not a real risk for a community-driven project, only for corporate-driven projects where a single entity owns copyright on the on all or close to all of the codebase.
    - isilofi 3y ago
      The important distinction isn't who owns copyright. It is rather that there needs to be a community opposed to the license change and able and willing to do the work. One could even imagine scenarios like an originally MIT-licensed software splitting into a commercial company offering commercial paid licenses, plus a community (or even the company itself) offering a GPL-licensed fork. Of course one could then still maintain an additional MIT-licensed fork, but if the rest of the community is happy with GPL and all the development just happens there, your MIT fork will "starve"...
    - hakre 3y ago
      While I'm able to understand your argument, IMHO the MIT license is not displaying that well. Community is plural, and fork with MIT could be like Windows: Closed source. End of the (fork) line. Given the project itself is still strong, this might not be a problem, but then I see no reason why it has chosen it in the first place if not for that specific option.
j-bos 3y ago
>clicking "agreed" in the installer is very often a contract that you should run by your legal advisors. The law often makes use of the reasonableness standard. I'm hard pressed to believe that carefully reading the hundreds of TOS and EULA's hoisted upon us is reasonable. If you're reading my comment you must have read the TOS/EULA for ycombinator, firefox (or chrome), your wireless or ISP, the keyboard app on your phone, odds are you have an email, perhaps a google account, remember the OS licence. Ever listened to a music streaming service, watched youtube? Messaged using an app? Banked online? Have some managed passwords? Like games, how many? For the common people, what about social media? That's about a dozen "contracts" and that's lowballing it, multiplied by each update to the "agreement" (pray they don't alterate further) multiplied by the requirement to also read and acknowledge the privcy policy. All this for services that have become when not essential ubiquitous and constantly shift under you. You'd need 8 figures to run that by a lawyer, or a part time job to carefully consider. That's not a reasonable arrangement.
- RugnirViking 3y ago
  to be more charitable to the above, we're not talking about consumer software. if you're starting a company selling something there is a fair bit more reasonableness in asking you to read a contract
  - isilofi 3y ago
    Exactly. This isn't about Joe Blow not reading the ToS for his eleventieth browser toolbar. This is about a business not reading the ToS for an essential, integral component that will cost you dearly to replace and might bankrupt the business.
  - baobabKoodaa 3y ago
    What you are proposing is literally impossible. If I were to comb through every ToS and EULA and every other legal text related to tools I use as a developer, I would not have any hours left in the day for, you know, actual development. Even then, I wouldn't have time to read and comprehend all of the legal contracts. Hell, if I stopped sleeping entirely and spent 24 hours a day combing through legal contracts, I still wouldn't have enough time to go through all of them. So, no, your request is not reasonable.

TMM2K 3y ago

Godot is MIT licensed though, there's very little we can do to screw our users if we wanted to, which we do not :)

nhinck 3y ago
You could change the license for future versions and charge for said updates, for the market that godot targets that would be more a little screwing to them. How long would it take for someone to take over the project (if ever).
- jehb 3y ago
  And it's at exactly this moment the community would fork the project and development of a free version would continue. This is not a real risk for a community-driven project, only for corporate-driven projects where a single entity owns copyright on the on all or close to all of the codebase.
  - isilofi 3y ago
    The important distinction isn't who owns copyright. It is rather that there needs to be a community opposed to the license change and able and willing to do the work. One could even imagine scenarios like an originally MIT-licensed software splitting into a commercial company offering commercial paid licenses, plus a community (or even the company itself) offering a GPL-licensed fork. Of course one could then still maintain an additional MIT-licensed fork, but if the rest of the community is happy with GPL and all the development just happens there, your MIT fork will "starve"...
  - hakre 3y ago
    While I'm able to understand your argument, IMHO the MIT license is not displaying that well. Community is plural, and fork with MIT could be like Windows: Closed source. End of the (fork) line. Given the project itself is still strong, this might not be a problem, but then I see no reason why it has chosen it in the first place if not for that specific option.

j-bos 3y ago

>clicking "agreed" in the installer is very often a contract that you should run by your legal advisors. The law often makes use of the reasonableness standard. I'm hard pressed to believe that carefully reading the hundreds of TOS and EULA's hoisted upon us is reasonable. If you're reading my comment you must have read the TOS/EULA for ycombinator, firefox (or chrome), your wireless or ISP, the keyboard app on your phone, odds are you have an email, perhaps a google account, remember the OS licence. Ever listened to a music streaming service, watched youtube? Messaged using an app? Banked online? Have some managed passwords? Like games, how many? For the common people, what about social media? That's about a dozen "contracts" and that's lowballing it, multiplied by each update to the "agreement" (pray they don't alterate further) multiplied by the requirement to also read and acknowledge the privcy policy. All this for services that have become when not essential ubiquitous and constantly shift under you. You'd need 8 figures to run that by a lawyer, or a part time job to carefully consider. That's not a reasonable arrangement.

RugnirViking 3y ago
to be more charitable to the above, we're not talking about consumer software. if you're starting a company selling something there is a fair bit more reasonableness in asking you to read a contract
- isilofi 3y ago
  Exactly. This isn't about Joe Blow not reading the ToS for his eleventieth browser toolbar. This is about a business not reading the ToS for an essential, integral component that will cost you dearly to replace and might bankrupt the business.
- baobabKoodaa 3y ago
  What you are proposing is literally impossible. If I were to comb through every ToS and EULA and every other legal text related to tools I use as a developer, I would not have any hours left in the day for, you know, actual development. Even then, I wouldn't have time to read and comprehend all of the legal contracts. Hell, if I stopped sleeping entirely and spent 24 hours a day combing through legal contracts, I still wouldn't have enough time to go through all of them. So, no, your request is not reasonable.