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I don't think the license as stated prohibits people from looking at the code, and if it does I would clarify to anyone who is interested that I'm totally ok wi

I don't think the license as stated prohibits people from looking at the code, and if it does I would clarify to anyone who is interested that I'm totally ok with you taking a look at what I've been working on. I appreciate your feedback, although my experience has taught me that those of us in the HN crowd have a completely different and disconnected understanding of software licensing compared to what lawyers think. I worked at a couple IP heavy companies and my impression is that any license that leans toward the Richard Stallman way is a huge red flag for businesses. I recall that GPL v3 is much better than v2. I'm also of the understanding that both BSD and MIT are discouraged now because the license is so thin, and they don't say anything about patents, while Apache 2.0 does. I invite anyone to contribute more to this discussion, because it happens to be one of those political things that can be more important than the code itself.

david-given 11y ago
Well, you _do_ say: "This software is not currently available under any license." I know that's not what you _mean_, but it's what you _say_. My personal and uninformed option is that you should probably change this to something along the lines of: "This software may be studied but not modified, and copies not be redistributed", which is more explicit. I am not, personally, a fan of the GPL (it makes things too complicated) and tend to release all my software as MIT or BSD-2 because I like the simplicity. But Apache-2 is a perfectly decent license. Nobody will complain about that. Ah, here's a good bullet-point comparison: http://choosealicense.com/licenses/ http://choosealicense.com/licenses/
pvg 11y ago
The 'looking at' part is explicitly covered by the Github ToS you've agreed to so you're all set for that. Although if you're concerned about un- or poorly defined behaviour, it also gives others the right to fork your repo on Github, whatever that implies. This is their ToS blurb: However, by setting your pages to be viewed publicly, you agree to allow others to view your Content. By setting your repositories to be viewed publicly, you agree to allow others to view and fork your repositories.

david-given 11y ago

Well, you _do_ say: "This software is not currently available under any license." I know that's not what you _mean_, but it's what you _say_. My personal and uninformed option is that you should probably change this to something along the lines of: "This software may be studied but not modified, and copies not be redistributed", which is more explicit. I am not, personally, a fan of the GPL (it makes things too complicated) and tend to release all my software as MIT or BSD-2 because I like the simplicity. But Apache-2 is a perfectly decent license. Nobody will complain about that. Ah, here's a good bullet-point comparison: http://choosealicense.com/licenses/ http://choosealicense.com/licenses/

pvg 11y ago

The 'looking at' part is explicitly covered by the Github ToS you've agreed to so you're all set for that. Although if you're concerned about un- or poorly defined behaviour, it also gives others the right to fork your repo on Github, whatever that implies. This is their ToS blurb: However, by setting your pages to be viewed publicly, you agree to allow others to view your Content. By setting your repositories to be viewed publicly, you agree to allow others to view and fork your repositories.