I'm not misreading it. The license says we cannot fork the software. That's not open source.

They had better start paying their lawyers overtime. You can't do a PR without forking and people fork on Github for a multitude of reasons (I often fork into a group as a lazy form of bookmarking or collecting projects).

Hell. I just clicked the 'fork' button. Where's my cease and desist?

I would argue that GitHub should remove this software. It just runs counter with their TOS.

A PR isn't the only way to contribute. You can also check out the repo and send in patch files.

Just wondering: for lazy repo bookmarking, why fork rather than star?

For me, forks are like super stars. I have an order of magnitude more stars than forks.

Isn't a different interpretation that a fork is, presumably, their software _plus_ your modification(s)? Thus, a fork is not "solely" their software anymore and is allowed.

The issue people are (rightly, imo) pointing out is that forking without modifications—say, to remain locked to a particular commit for whatever reasons one may have—appears to directly violate the terms of the custom license (which itself appears to directly violate the terms of Github's TOS.

Yes, but forking on GitHub means that initially it will be just their software.

If I understand right, you can fork it and even redistribute it, as long as your software isn't a blatant plagiarism of this repo. So technically, taking this library and putting it together with some other library yielding some meaningful application is enough to satisfy that clause.

I read it as only allowing you to redistribute unmodified copies, because clause 3 only permits modification "for your own internal use."

Also, even if were to improve on it and release it as a fork, as an example, it still falls into the definition of "software" and is in violation of the terms.

Do you have access to the source? Yes? It's open source.

Open Source need not be free as in beer, nor as in freedom.

No. Call that "source available", "source access" or something, but "Open Source" is pretty much established to be defined by the OSI definition of the term: https://opensource.org/osd

The OSI should trademark the phrase "open source". License it for anyone claiming their software is open source (as defined by OSI), and send cease and desists to anyone who is using the phase incorrectly.

They can't:

We have discovered that there is virtually no chance that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office would register the mark "open source"; the mark is too descriptive. Ironically, we were partly a victim of our own success in bringing the `open source' concept into the mainstream.

https://news.slashdot.org/story/99/06/17/0213251/esr-on-the-...

> ... but "Open Source" is pretty much retconned to be defined by the OSI definition of the term

"Open source" as a term or development methodology is older than both the OSI definition and the Debian manual it is based on.

what is the motivation to release the library on github with such a license? If you can't fork it you can't improve it.

They want the user adoption, without giving up control, presumably.

this might be silly, but why? what does Facebook gain by getting this library user adoption (beside some bug-reporting). I would think that for fb user adoption of the open source projects is not the goal, but getting OSS developers attracted and getting fixes/features etc. developed from them. Or is it some kind of pride? Fake internet point for having repositories on github?

My long-time-range guess is that this is FB's play for becoming a standard replacement/upgrade for GIFs. From the post:

"Initially, we looked at common static image formats such as PNG sequences and GIFs, as well as even more compressed formats like WebP. It quickly became clear that these wouldn't work without drastically simplifying the animations for file size, and that we'd have to accept the drawback of static images not scaling up or down very well."

So, reading between the lines, they've made what they think is a better GIF. And perhaps it is, and if so, that's big business[1], and so having a first-mover advantage on mobile could be highly profitable. (They're a public A-corporation, after all.)

But who knows; I could be reading too far into it or just flat-out wrong, too!

[1] http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a21457/the-gif-is...

I don't think any vector imaging format could ever replace a raster one (regardless of whether it's animated). Each has their own pros and cons.

Keyframes competes with animated SVGs, but not GIF/APNG/WebP.

But what is equivalent After Effects tool for creating animated svg's? I'm not aware of any existing simple/robust tool to animate svg's in a traditional manner. And definatly not with a tool many already know how to use, as well as tutorials for accomplishing anything one might come up with. Is there anything?

Dev mindshare.