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"It's easiest and safest to assume that property is not stolen" is a parallel construction of your argument. You can assume whatever you want but the cops may

"It's easiest and safest to assume that property is not stolen" is a parallel construction of your argument. You can assume whatever you want but the cops may not be very impressed. There are a lot of polite fictions in law, and this is one of them. If you had no reasonable way of knowing that a license was invalid (or property was stolen), the judge is probably going to be sympathetic, but the property will still get returned to its proper owner. If you DID have a reasonable way to know that the status of the property was suspect (as in this case), they are likely to take a dim view of the situation.

sneak 3y ago
I'm not talking about this code in particular - I am talking about all code presumably written by individuals and posted on GitHub with a LICENSE file saying it's free software. It is standard, reasonable person practice to use foss-labeled code on GitHub under the presumption that the license is not a lie. This case is no different. Nothing in the author's linked story suggests this code is not MIT licensed as the repo claims. It is unreasonable to assume that the license file in the repo is false; nothing available to us supports this assumption.
- kubanczyk 3y ago
  Yeah, you want to get rid of uncertainty, but it's here to stay. The whole legal system is not brought to its knees over the fact that no code on GitHub (gasp) is automatically guaranteed to be safe against copyright infringement. > It is standard, reasonable person practice to use foss-labeled code on GitHub under the presumption that the license is not a lie. Yes, absolutely: presumption, not certainty. (Nitpicking the phrasing: presumption that the copyright is not a lie, the issue does not even venture into licensing.)
- adammarples 3y ago
  I think it's reasonable to assume that it belongs wholy to Uber and that he was acting illegally to publish it on github. He even showed us the sofa in the Uber office where he wrote it. He told us his manager asked him to write the code and seemingly had no idea that he'd written a database engine. He told us that they were paranoid of industrial espionage at the time. There seems to be zero reason to suspect that Uber carved out a specific exception to the usual employment contract enabling him to work on and release this code as FOSS while at the company.
- austhrow743 3y ago
  >Nothing in the author's linked story suggests this code is not MIT licensed as the repo claims. The lack of him saying he went to the effort of having Box or Uber license their code MIT suggests it.
  - sneak 3y ago
    You seem to be using an absence of evidence as evidence of absence. There's nothing to explicitly suggest that either is the rightsholder; that is another assumption, which is directly counter to the fact that the person who wrote the code posted it alongside an MIT license.

sneak 3y ago

I'm not talking about this code in particular - I am talking about all code presumably written by individuals and posted on GitHub with a LICENSE file saying it's free software. It is standard, reasonable person practice to use foss-labeled code on GitHub under the presumption that the license is not a lie. This case is no different. Nothing in the author's linked story suggests this code is not MIT licensed as the repo claims. It is unreasonable to assume that the license file in the repo is false; nothing available to us supports this assumption.

kubanczyk 3y ago
Yeah, you want to get rid of uncertainty, but it's here to stay. The whole legal system is not brought to its knees over the fact that no code on GitHub (gasp) is automatically guaranteed to be safe against copyright infringement. > It is standard, reasonable person practice to use foss-labeled code on GitHub under the presumption that the license is not a lie. Yes, absolutely: presumption, not certainty. (Nitpicking the phrasing: presumption that the copyright is not a lie, the issue does not even venture into licensing.)
adammarples 3y ago
I think it's reasonable to assume that it belongs wholy to Uber and that he was acting illegally to publish it on github. He even showed us the sofa in the Uber office where he wrote it. He told us his manager asked him to write the code and seemingly had no idea that he'd written a database engine. He told us that they were paranoid of industrial espionage at the time. There seems to be zero reason to suspect that Uber carved out a specific exception to the usual employment contract enabling him to work on and release this code as FOSS while at the company.
austhrow743 3y ago
>Nothing in the author's linked story suggests this code is not MIT licensed as the repo claims. The lack of him saying he went to the effort of having Box or Uber license their code MIT suggests it.
- sneak 3y ago
  You seem to be using an absence of evidence as evidence of absence. There's nothing to explicitly suggest that either is the rightsholder; that is another assumption, which is directly counter to the fact that the person who wrote the code posted it alongside an MIT license.