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

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?"

Comments

Because

[OverlordQ]

Because it's a free place to store a git repo as a backup.

Re:Because

[cheesybagel]

I only use GitHub for code I have written under non-commercial licenses. Mostly Linux ports of former commercial games. SourceForge won't host them. Icculus is a bit of a pain to convince to host your code. GitHub is one of the few choices available gratis.

Re:Because

[amorsen]

In sensible jurisdictions, the act of running a program is not a copyright event, since it does not involve distribution. When you download, compile, and execute something from Github, the only copyright event is Github distributing the source file. The rest is not of concern to copyright law.

Alas, when copyright was conceived, copying and distribution were practically one and the same, so "right to distribute" was unfortunately misnamed "copyright". Many jurisdictions later looked at computers and misunderstood any bit duplication to be a copyright event. Denmark is one of the most extreme cases, where every (ISP or otherwise) router is subject to copyright law whenever it moves copyrighted bits around. That level of absurdity is fortunately fairly rare.

Terms of github

[phantomfive]

From the terms of service from github:

We claim no intellectual property rights over the material you provide to the Service. Your profile and materials uploaded remain yours. 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.

If you use source code found on github, it's going to be hard for the author to win a copyright lawsuit. This is a non-issue. They've basically allowed you to fork the code (with the implication that you're going to modify it). I don't see them in any way being able to recover punitive or even statutory damages.

The real danger with github, as with all open source, is ensuring that the project's owner hasn't stolen proprietary code from somewhere else. Imagine if Linus had grabbed some files from Unix, then IBM would have been in a lot more difficulty during the SCO case. Fortunately the only things Linus copied were semicolons and braces.

But if you use someone's code through an open source project, you can be liable, even if you got the code under the GPL or BSD license, because the project's owner didn't have the right to give you that code.