Half of GitHub Code Unsafe To Use (If You Want Open Source)

Posted by timothy on Saturday December 1, 2012 @05:39AM from the but-they-said-to-download dept.

WebMink writes "GitHub is a great open source hosting site, right? Wrong. There's no requirement that projects on GitHub provide any copyright license, let alone an open source one, so roughly half the projects on GitHub are "all rights reserved" — meaning you could well be violating copyright if you make any use of the code in them. And GitHub management seem just fine with this state of affairs, saying picking a license is too hard for ordinary developers. But if you're not going to give anyone permission to use your code, why post it on GitHub in the first place?"

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Re:Conflating copyright and patent again... by smittyoneeach · 2012-12-01 05:58 · Score: 3, Funny

conflating piracy and theft
Who does that? Piracy requires an ocean, ships, and lots of brutal, hand-to-hand combat effort.
Modern theft has been reduced to legislation.

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Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Re:Because by rbprbp · 2012-12-01 07:06 · Score: 5, Funny

This has been my approach to homework (which is mostly .tex and .py). For all I care, I don't mind if someone forks my homework or does anything with it. Though I wouldn't mind them merging their changes back :)

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They're there in their room. You're on your own.