Pushing Back Against Licensing and the Permission Culture

kthreadd writes "Luis Villa has an interesting discussion on the topic of not licensing at all, what he calls POSS or Post Open Source Software. With a flood of new hackers flocking to places like GitHub which doesn't impose any particular requirements for hosted projects, the future of Open Source may very well be diminishing. Skip licensing, just commit to GitHub. What legal ramifications will this have on the free and open source community going forward?" From the article: "If some 'no license' sharing is a quiet rejection of the permission culture, the lawyer’s solution (make everyone use a license, for their own good!) starts to look bad. This is because once an author has used a standard license, their immediate interests are protected – but the political content of not choosing a license is lost. Or to put it another way: if license authors get their wish, and everyone uses a license for all content, then, to the casual observer, it looks like everyone accepts the permission culture. This could make it harder to change that culture — to change the defaults — in the long run. So how might we preserve the content of the political speech against the permission culture, while also allowing for use in that same, actually-existing permission culture?"

Comments

Uh ... What?

[eldavojohn]

Am I missing something? From the article via Twitter:

younger devs today are about POSS – Post open source software. fuck the license and governance, just commit to github. - James Governor (@monkchips) September 17, 2012

Ah, yes, eloquently stated. And, you know, it's totally okay to do that but let's assume that you've "fucked" the license and governance and your code is great and popular. Now, what stops a company from taking your code and making massive changes to it and shipping that code for mad moneys? What forces them to give back their changes that might make that code better? What did you and the community gain by contributing to that company's revenue? What if I just took your code and put it on a CD and started selling it with no credit to you and no link or reference to the source code? Wouldn't that rub you the wrong way? Just a little? Well, what if that company then claimed that your code was an unlicensed version of their code and moved to have it remove?

And that's why we have open source licenses. So those are out there and if you're lazy or whatever you can just download this file (or the corresponding OSS license you like) and put it in the root directory of your source tree. Are you really too lazy to include a simple txt file in your source tree? At the possible expense of your $MOST_HATED_COMPANY turning the screws on you?

This article seems to focus on just the "hey browski, I heard you liked code, here's my code" hippy hacker mentality and grievously ignores the "did Facebook just use an altered version of my library to track its mobile users?" possibilities.

To follow the analogy started by the twitter post: OSS licenses are like a condoms. Stop being lazy and just use one.

Re:Uh ... What?

[Cid Highwind]

Now, what stops a company from taking your code and making massive changes to it and shipping that code for mad moneys?

Their legal department. Without a more permissive license, they're stuck with default copyright terms (no copying except for narrow "fair use" exceptions) so they can't distribute it. Ethical companies wont touch it, unethical ones would have no qualms about pirating BSD/MIT/GPL/whatever licensed code anyway, and the hackers and hippies don't care about licenses will use it and carry on not caring about licenses.

Re:Uh ... What?

[Americano]

The point that the author is making is that there should be some sort of option to allow you to specify this - "do whatever the hell you want, stop asking me if you can use it, I don't care."

He's making the point because, as he notes, a significant portion of the code on GitHub doesn't specify a license, which means it defaults to "all rights reserved," even though that's clearly not the intent of at least some portion of the "no-license" authors there.

Re:Uh ... What?

[icebike]

Posting as AC its clear you don't intend to assert these rights. That's not the issue.
Someone else can assert the rights.

They take your code, change it just a tiny bit, and turn around and demand license fees from other users, and perhaps you yourself. (Don't laugh, this has happened). Slap at least some kind of license on your code, if for no other reason than protect people who want to use it in the future. Give them some legal standing to use your code before some other entity asserts their own ownership.

Pick a license, any license, but don't send your code naked into the world to be used as a club by others. You aren't doing anyone any favors by releasing with no license whatsoever.

Wishful thinking does not change the law

[ShanghaiBill]

From TFA:

the open license ecosystem assumes that sharing can’t (or even shouldn’t) happen without explicit permission in the form of licenses.

This is because our legal system makes this assumption. Wishful thinking does not make laws go away. If you release software with no license, then it is legally presumed to have full copyright protection. You need to explicitly give up your rights.

Better read up on what GitHub does impose...

[cjjjer]

By default all code that does not have a license is "all rights reserved" http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-source-software/github-needs-take-open-source-seriously-208046

Re:the point is to keep the leachers in line

[ShanghaiBill]

if there is no license than someone can take the work, use it for their own product, make money and not give anything back

Nope. If there is no license, then the work is presumed to have full copyright protection. Full copyright is the default , and you need to provide an alternative license if you want people to legally use it in any way.