Trump's new platform and the Affero General Public License of Mastodon

Re:Trump's new platform and the Affero General Public Licens... by CydeWeys on Saturday October 23, 2021 @09:12AM (#28968070)

You can escalate to legal for edge cases, but you should be able to handle base cases yourself. As an example, I work at Google on an Apache 2.0-licensed open source project, and we have dozens of third party dependencies: https://github.com/google/nomulus/blob/master/core/build.gra...

It wouldn't remotely scale across Google if we had to escalate to legal every single time we pulled in a new dependency. Instead, there's a company-wide allowlist of accepted software licenses, and you only need legal help for exceptions beyond that.

So yes, we do have to know some basics of software licensing. It's just part of being a SWE.

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Re:Trump's new platform and the Affero General Public Licens... by orf on Saturday October 23, 2021 @09:17AM (#28968100)

So a SWE just needs to see if the set of allowed licenses contains the project license. That doesn’t require any knowledge of the license itself, other than “they exist”.

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Re:Trump's new platform and the Affero General Public Licens... by jdavis703 on Tuesday October 26, 2021 @01:06PM (#29003013)

It does though. Like why waste time if you know a viral GPL-style license or a patent encumbered license would be a no go?

This is akin to saying SWE’s don’t need to understand GDPR, COPA, HIPPA, DMCA or whatever. Obviously there might be cases where someone never touches code in a GDPR or HIPPA context. But any SWE working in those areas should damn well understand the basics of the law — at least enough to flag inadvertent, but none the less blatant violations.

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Re:Trump's new platform and the Affero General Public Licens... by phendrenad2 on Tuesday November 02, 2021 @09:52AM (#29081199)

SWEs are all Star Wars trivia nerds, surely they can handle a few software licenses and GDPR rules and stuff.

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