3 ms·

It seems pretty clear the intent was to use a non-commercial license, so it’s probably something that would go to court, if you really wanted to press the issue

by ed 3y ago

It seems pretty clear the intent was to use a non-commercial license, so it’s probably something that would go to court, if you really wanted to press the issue. Generally courts are more holistic and look at intent, and understand that clerical errors happen. One exception to this is if a business claims it relied on the previous license and invested a bunch of resources as a result. I believe the timing of commits is pretty important— it would be hard to claim your business made a substantial investment on a pre-announcement repo that was only MIT’ed for a few hours.

RIMR 3y ago
If I clone/fork that repo before the license change, and start putting any amount of time into developing my own fork in good faith, they shouldn't be allowed to claim a clerical error when they lied to me upon delivery about what I was allowed to do with the code. Licenses are important. If you are going to expose your code to the world, make sure it has the right license. If you publish your code with the wrong license, you shouldn't be allowed to take it back. Not for an organization of this size that is going to see a new repo cloned thousands of times upon release.
- ed 3y ago
  There’s no case law here, so if you’re volunteering to find out what a judge thinks we’d surely appreciate it!
- wokwokwok 3y ago
  No, sadly this won’t fly in court. For the same reason you cannot publish a private corporate repo with an MIT license and then have other people claim in “good faith” to be using it. All they need is to assert that the license was published in error, or that the person publishing it did not have the authority to publish it. You can’t “magically” make a license stick by putting it in a repo, any more than putting a “name here” sticker on someone’s car and then claiming to own it. The license file in the repo is simply the notice of the license. It does not indicate a binding legal agreement. You of course, can challenge it in court, and ianal, but I assure you, there is president in incorrectly labelled repos removing and changing their licenses.
  - RIMR 3y ago
    >All they need is to assert that the license was published in error, or that the person publishing it did not have the authority to publish it. Show me where they did this. All they have is a commit that says "Update License". An update doesn't imply a correction.
  - arcbyte 3y ago
    It could very well fly. Agency law, promissory estoppel, ...

by ed 3y ago

RIMR 3y ago

If I clone/fork that repo before the license change, and start putting any amount of time into developing my own fork in good faith, they shouldn't be allowed to claim a clerical error when they lied to me upon delivery about what I was allowed to do with the code. Licenses are important. If you are going to expose your code to the world, make sure it has the right license. If you publish your code with the wrong license, you shouldn't be allowed to take it back. Not for an organization of this size that is going to see a new repo cloned thousands of times upon release.

ed 3y ago
There’s no case law here, so if you’re volunteering to find out what a judge thinks we’d surely appreciate it!
wokwokwok 3y ago
No, sadly this won’t fly in court. For the same reason you cannot publish a private corporate repo with an MIT license and then have other people claim in “good faith” to be using it. All they need is to assert that the license was published in error, or that the person publishing it did not have the authority to publish it. You can’t “magically” make a license stick by putting it in a repo, any more than putting a “name here” sticker on someone’s car and then claiming to own it. The license file in the repo is simply the notice of the license. It does not indicate a binding legal agreement. You of course, can challenge it in court, and ianal, but I assure you, there is president in incorrectly labelled repos removing and changing their licenses.
- RIMR 3y ago
  >All they need is to assert that the license was published in error, or that the person publishing it did not have the authority to publish it. Show me where they did this. All they have is a commit that says "Update License". An update doesn't imply a correction.
- arcbyte 3y ago
  It could very well fly. Agency law, promissory estoppel, ...