>Anubis is provided to the public for free in order to help advance the common good. In return, we ask (but not demand, these are words on the internet, not word of law) that you not remove the Anubis character from your deployment.
>If you want to run an unbranded or white-label version of Anubis, please contact Xe to arrange a contract.
Hope this is useful to others!
Compare to a take-a-penny-leave-a-penny tray from an era past. You are legally allowed to scoop up all the pennies into a bag, and leave the store, then repeat at the neighboring store, and make a few bucks. You'd be an asshole, but not face legal trouble. You "followed the rules" to the letter. But guess what? If you publish an easy how-to guide with "one weird trick" for making some quick cash, and people start adopting your antisocial behavior and emptying out change trays, you've forced the issue and now either a) businesses will stop offering this convenience or b) the rules around it will be tightened and the utility will be degraded. In the concrete case of Anubis, the maintainers may decide to stop contributing their time to this useful software or place a non-FOSS license on it in an attempt to stop gain-maximizing sociopaths from exploiting their efforts.
Your analogy to me seems imprecise, as analogies tend to be when it comes to digital goods. I'm not taking pennies in any sense here, preventing the next person from making use of some public good.
You can make a similar argument for piracy or open source, and yet... Here we all still are and open source has won for the most part.
The GPL protects users from any restrictions the author wants to use. No additional restrictions are allowed, whether technical or legal.
In this case, the restriction is social, but is a restriction nonetheless (some enforce it by harassment, some by making you feel bad).
But you could ignore it, even fork it and create a white label version, and be proud of it (thereby bypassing the restriction). Donate voluntarily if you want to contribute, without being restricted technically, legally, or socially.
I even it out by how I prioritize feature requests, bug reports, and the like :)
I didn't implement this out of fear or some lack of courage. In fact I had the original avatars up for quite a while. I simply wanted my own logo so visitors wouldn't be potentially confused. It seemed to fit the use case and there was no way to achieve what I wanted without reaching out. I didn't feel comfortable bugging you or anybody on account of my tiny little no-traffic git forge even though, yes, that is what you politely asked for (and did not demand).
I think if you do feel this strongly you might consider changing the software's license or the phrasing of the request in the documentation. Or perhaps making it very clear that no matter how small, you want to be reached out to for the whitelabel version.
I think the success story of Anubis has been awesome to read about and follow and seeing how things unfold further will be fun to watch and possibly even contribute to. I'm personally rooting for you and your project!
Some project even took it to the next level and displayed a furry porn. I think anime and furry graphics are related, esp. in the weird obsession of the people to shove it to the unsuspecting people, but since it's "cute" it's passable. Well unless it gets into the porn territory.
On the other hand I applaud the author for an interesting variation of making the free product slightly degraded so people are incentived to donate money. The power of defaults and their misuse.
Personally I'm not fan of enshittification of any kind even a slight one even when it's to my own detriment.
Except the author is not shoving any stuff at you. Author doesn't owe anything to you and can do whatever they want and you doesn't owe the author the obligation to use their software.
It's not business, it's a person giving something free to the world and asking people who uses it to play the game. You can chose to not play the game or to not use it, but you can't act like your issue with an anime character is the author's fault. Just don't install it on your server and go ahead.
Are you sure you have the right pronouns for Xe?
This is your weird association and hang-up. That's on you to deal with, not Anubis or the rest of the internet.
The author clearly went out of the way to put code in to signal to people that if you use the software and you are a company earning revenue using it, to help support the project.
This is clearly breaking the social contract that comes along with that MIT license, guided by what the author says.
When you break the social contract, and by doing so you induce people to follow you to do the same, eventually (given sufficient breakage) you end up in a world on fire; filled with violence and destruction.
This happens because non-violent conflict resolution can't take place without society, which itself is based on the social contract. A contract that you broke by trying to work around the authors intent.
It is well known that with people, "What you do in the small things, you do in big things that matter when everything is on the line". This piece of old wisdom, shows a cognitive preferential bias.
Ipso facto, you are supporting that world on fire filled with violence coming into being by those actions.
Sure you don't see anything wrong now, but that is blindness, and you can hold that isolated view right now while society is still in a working state, but actions and choices matter, and society moves towards the aggregate, either towards stability or towards chaos.
There is a time that is not far off, where that kind of behavior is going to have severe consequences.
If you did this without any resistance or seeing this as wrong, you have to ask yourself how many other things you've done that you just didn't notice? Are your kids modeling this blindness in themselves? Mimicking you as a role model.
Blindness puts people at a significant disadvantage because they often can't see the dangers they often create indirectly for themselves.
This is not 'equating' because they aren't the same thing, its reasoning that logically follows, which is in part based on history and an understanding of how society actually formed, worked, and why its been slowly failing (to the best of our greatest thinkers knowledge over our recorded history).
You are only focused on the MIT license and exclude all other things, but that is not all there is, the author published their intent.
The process you followed is putting blinders on, looking at one thing in isolation. The MIT license.
You ignore the authors words and published intent, and go so far as to undo them, while taking and using the majority of the author's work. There was a social contract and an MIT license. One is based in law, the other is based in the goodwill inherent in society, the general implicit intent towards promoting survival and growth for people of like principles.
This process follows a well known reasoning structure in philosophy, its called the fallacy of isolation. You learn all about these flawed structures in a trivium based education that doesn't follow a lying to children paradigm (which is the opposite of a first-principled approach (greeks), instead embracing torture structures and parasitism/dependency).
You learn these things so you can avoid using them accidentally, and by extension speak and relay true words and arguments.
Its flawed reasoning or a fallacy because it oversimplifies, and uses a biased sample to justify something that can't be justified in the general sense, it overgeneralizes the isolated part for a self-driven purpose which is not based on external measure but on your intent (to justify your action).
In other words, you have separated the objectionable concern to do something.
This separation of objectionable concerns is a structure that the Nazi's and East German Stasi mastered and brought to the masses, to devastating effect. Redefining the meaning of words is also something the Nazi's used, you didn't do this but I mention it because its common too.
The Wannsee Conference documented both of these things iirc, a movie depicting this was made in 2001 called "Conspiracy" based on the recorded minutes of that conference. The unspoken part of that movie is those that didn't agree at the conference were to later be killed. Well worth a watch if you can't envision these things.
Getting back to the matter, if you wanted to make different software without a restriction imposed by the author's intent, you should do that without leaning on the author's work.
Honestly, that's the ethical thing to do. Proof of Work isn't a difficult concept, it would be almost trivial to put together a solution that would do the same thing given all the implementations available to reference with crypto (which uses PoW).
I'd highly suggest you read a bit more about the basis for the Western way of life (The underlying principles which inspired the founding fathers to rebel against the crown and start a new nation; America), and so you can see the logical steps that lead to bad outcomes.
Social Contract Theory, and the Greeks/Roman history are good places to start.
Choices and actions matter, even if they are small, the smallest ripple can quickly grow. The choices and actions inspire others one way or another to do the same.
I guess I took the MIT license as the author's word and intent. Are you saying their choice of license is not? It clearly outlines that I am free to use the software without restriction which you conveniently leave out of your core argument.
If you want to talk about open source and the social contract, this is the heart of it: freedom, which I have exercised. If I was using it for commercial purposes and doing something more against the "spirit of open source" I think I might be inclined to agree with you. But I'm not.
the funding page clarifies their intent:
>Anubis is provided to the public for free in order to help advance the common good. In return, we ask (but not demand, these are words on the internet, not word of law) that you not remove the Anubis character from your deployment.
you are of course free to do whatever you want with this code, the license is as you point out quite clear. but so is the intent, and feigning ignorance of the author's intent is disingenuous at best.
If you'll allow me to make assumptions, given that the author neither demands -- and is, in fact, explicit about not doing so -- nor licenses the software in such a way as to prevent this use case, I am guessing the author had at least some intent or foreknowledge around some folks wanting to swap the images. I further assumed that such use cases were for instances such as those the author wrote Anubis for to begin with, protecting small git forges with little resources. Now, I admit my server is not small and I have resources, and so am happy to pay for and donate towards open source software, but in this case the only option was to contact the author, which is something I deemed overkill in this case. I would simply wait and see how the author planned to approach the issue and revisit at that time.
Perhaps I've made the wrong move socially or ethically, which I think is at least a worthwhile discussion to have, and if I should decide I feel like I've made an ethically sideways choice, I will eat my words and make things right as best as I can.
However, if we're going to talk about intent, I an guessing there is a bit more nuance to bring to the conversation. Or perhaps the author can chime in or update the documentation to be more clear, because the liberal license says quite a lot about intent to me. I think it's at least a little disingenuous to say that the software license carries no intent behind it (spirit of open source and all that) and is "only" an enumeration of my rights.
I think it's clear the author "desires" or "wants" folks to keep the images. However, I think the author also "wants" users to use the software without restriction, hence the license.
If I say I intend one thing in one place, but then also say another thing orthogonal to that thing elsewhere that seems to be at odds, what was my intent truly? If my actions do not line up with my words, how do external parties judge what is the socially acceptable approach given my two statements that are at odds?
I simply think the choice of license says a lot more about intent, and is, in fact, the mechanism by which a creator decides how their code may be used. If the author truly intends their software to be used a certain way, the license is _the_ way to have control over that.
I believe this conversation is a bit more nuanced than you are making it out to be and the discussion around "what is open source" is where this discussion begins and ends. I'm not going to try and argue about what the author "wants", which, I agree with you, seems clear, but is not expressed fully, given the chosen unrestricted license.
I wasn't even aware that you had reached out directly where the author made themselves clear. The license doesn't supersede the authors words.
When there's a contradiction, you take the authors words and intent first, the same as any hierarchical set of documents. The authors words will be far more detailed than any license, and the social contract comes first so everyone can continue receiving benefit under it. There are edge cases, this isn't one of them.
By focusing on the license to the exclusion of all else, you pigeonhole the only actions so the only alternative is to not provide any solutions, and in the process taking the authors work. This acts towards eliminating the social contract through destructive interference, towards not provide the benefits you enjoy under the social contract while you at the same time breaking it.
There isn't nuance that allows for you to do what you did. Its not a court of law that you can get to argue false justification, its a simple ethical question that includes the authors intent which you exclude, and the license, which you dissemble on.
There are things you can do that can't be forced by society, but the social contract has never been about forcing people. As you say its been about freeing people to act towards the benefit and survival of others.
Part of this is the important choice to know when you should not do something because it breaks that contract and incentivizes destructive outcomes. This is where ethics and reasoning following Method come in. You aren't following Method or Logic here, you follow fallacy.
> If the author truly intends their software to be used a certain way ...
The law is not perfect, and in fact many places the rule of law has failed following similar degradation in reasoning that you follow here, which has become known as judicial activism. I've already said what happens generically, so you've been warned even if you don't see it.
The true nature of evil is in the blindness it induces in self and others so they can adopt evil without resistance. I'm not saying you are evil, but this is a very slippery slope that you don't even realize you are on when you've become blind.
To become blind, you have to make a willful choice to be blind, and the nature of perception and your subconscious forces you to ignore anything to the contrary after that, its a basic psychological bias.
We have many psychological blindspots as members of humanity, which is why in many religions they cover behaviors that help avoid adoption of destructive behaviors through those blindspots, and objective tests to know when (in Christianity a part of this is in the 7 virtues, and 7 sins). This has a lot of nuance that few read into.
Wrath for example is the loss of rationality, flawed reasoning meets that definition as a deadly sin when its to the exclusion of all else (i.e. blind).
Complacency, is sloth, most of the rest are primal desires towards destructive ends. You get the idea.
There are those that may claim to embrace these things but have blinded themselves so they don't know when they break them. You generally can't be good in the long run, if you are blind to the bad you do in the short.
You appear to have no resistance to breaking the contract. This is a perceptual blindness, and it disadvantages you, and it disadvantages those who you might induce to do the same, whether it be as a role-model from proximity or otherwise.
> I'm not going to try and argue about what the author "wants", ..., but is not expressed fully.
The author's intent is expressed to sufficient degree that choices can be made to either follow the authors intent if you use their work, or not. Its not a novel construction, so you can build it yourself on your own and then do whatever you want with that creation, that would be the right path to be ethical about this.
You don't seem to make the right choice here. This discussion is irrespective of the subjective definition of what individuals consider open source is. This is a cop out. The author published their expectations, you either follow them or you don't, and undermining those expectations is on the side of you choosing you don't.
To say that the license doesn't supersede the author's words is your opinion. It does, in fact, supersede the request both in law and "socially".
If any requirement or request need be laid upon the software and its use, there are mechanisms for doing that available today and the author willingly chose to try something new. This doesn't negate their request, but it does bring into question the "social contract"; people have certain social expectations of software, particularly when licensed like this, that you seem to ignore or consider null in this argument, which seems unfair and one-sided.
I do believe that this situation is not as cut and dry and morally wrong as you seem to be stating. What of a user that deploys the project without ever reading that specific page of documentation?
Perhaps you and I are debating towards different end states here. Myself towards what a fleshed-out approach to this kind of permissive-license-plus-social-request open-source might look like and you towards ignoring the request of another human being implying an eventual complete breakdown in society.
It's simply untrue that every request from every human being (regarding something they have made or otherwise) must be respected and followed above all else and to think otherwise trends towards its own breakdown of society. Intent and requests are not the be-all-end-all of ethical cooperation that you seem to be arguing for. Does this imply that anarchy and chaos are the answer? No, of course not! As I have tried to indicate, there is more nuance here than your argument makes room for and indeed the lack of nuance in your own argument as you tighten it down further results in its own ethical problems which you seem to be trying to argue into impossibility.
Alas, we humans on an individual and group level will always have mutually exclusive goals and opinions and working through those is part of the human experience - relationships take communication, work, nuance, understanding, and compromise. Absolutism such as you are calling for is the kind of thing that results in societal collapse as well.
In summary, I agree with you that asking the author is the right thing to do here as I _did_ read the documentation thoroughly and I should have done so and not assumed that my little personal git forge was "exempt" from the request. As a result, I have reached out to discuss as requested. I also would say that anyone else that opts to interpret the license literally would also be in the right, though. I also disagree that this issue is as cut and dry as you make it out to be. I also believe the status quo around "open source plus restrictions" (if you can say there is much of one) can be greatly improved and is a discourse worth having.
???
Really though my dayjob kinda burns me out because I have to focus on AEO, which is SEO but for AI. I get by making and writing about cool things, but damn does it hurt having to write for machines instead of humans.
The code is open source, so I can’t imagine making a fork to remove that is a Herculean effort.
> Regardless, Xe did ask nicely to not change out the images shipped as a whitelabel service is planned in the future
https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis/pull/204#issuecomment-27...
Anywhere I can read more about this? Sounds super interesting, and a cursory search didn’t show anything for it on your site.
Otherwise I’m sure I’ll hear about it soon anyway, at the rate Anubis is going!
I am also working on some noJS checks, but I want to test them with paid customers in order to let a thousand flowers bloom.
That feels uncomfortably close to returning to the privacy-and-CGNAT-hating embrace of cloudflare et al.
However, you are allowed to believe what you want and I can't stop you from being wrong.
Oh, if it's just to make things potentially easier while leaving the baseline where it is then that's fine.
> However, you are allowed to believe what you want and I can't stop you from being wrong.
For instance, you appear to believe that I'm attacking you?
>For instance, you appear to believe that I'm attacking you?
FWIW, that's not what I read. You made an assumption about implementation and the effects based on very little information. Xe simply said you can believe (i.e., make assumptions about) whatever you want. You then assumed (another one) that your comment was interpreted as an attack.
Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't. There's not enough context in here to know either way.
Of course, if you use this service for your enterprise, the Right Thing To Do would be support the excellent project financially, but this is by no means required.
If you want to use this project on your site and don’t like the logo, you are free to change it. If the site is personal and this project is not something you would spend money on, I don’t even think it is unethical to change the image.
Note that I’m not faulting you for behaving this way, no insult or disparagement intended, etc.! Open source inherited this dissonance between giving it all away to anyone who asks for free, and giving nothing of yours back in return because prosocial is not an ethical standard, from its predecessor belief system. It remains unsolved decades later, in both open source and libertarianism, and I certainly don’t hold generic exploiters of the prosocial-imbalance defect accountable for the underlying flaw in both belief systems.
> Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software
I disagree.
Licenses that prohibit exploitation of source code for personal reward are treated with hostility, shame, and boycotts — claiming that to restrict in any way the liberty of another person to exploit one’s work is unethical. Human beings are social creatures, and most human beings are not asocial with decoupled ethical systems like myself; so, given the social pressures in play, few human beings truly have the liberty to pick another license and endure the shame and vitriol that exercising that freedom earns from us.
Since the original subject is also about swapping out the imagery, it's also difficult to take your argument too seriously as the term "exploit" is doing a lot of heavy lifting for your argument.
I will also add that the social and ethical component goes both ways: is it ethical to knowingly give something away freely and without restriction and then immediately attempt to impose restrictions through a purely social mechanism? I would say so as long as your expectation is that some might politely decline.
Or worse, some may respond with the same vitriol and then we're at your original point, which doesn't seem to be preventing such an approach here, making me doubt your hypothesis.
I'd have to disagree. However let's just run with it because your subsequent reasoning doesn't seem consistent to me.
If you do A you'll be met with hostility. So instead you do B, but then you add a request "actually please abide by A" and somehow this is supposed to not be met with hostility? You can't have it both ways. B but with an addendum that makes it A is just A wearing a mask. Changing the name doesn't change the thing.
I’m trying to imagine how this might be unethical. The only scenario I can think of is if the authors wanted the code to not be modified in certain ways, but felt based on more deeply held principles that the code should be made FOSS. But I struggle to see how both ideas could exist simultaneously - if you think code should be free then you think there is no ethical issue with people modifying it to fit their use.
If you believe in giving away code because that’s open-source prosocial, then open-source adherents will claim that taking advantage of you is ethical, because if you didn’t want to be exploited, you shouldn’t have been open-source prosocial in the first place. And by treating “pay me if you get paid for my code” licenses as treated as evil and shameful, exploiters place pressures on prosocial maintainers into adopting open source licenses, even though they’ll then be exploited by people who don’t care about being prosocial, eventually burning out the maintainer who either silent-quits or rage-quits.
Of course, if OSI signed off on “if you get rich from my source code you have to share some of that wealth back to me” as a permissible form of clause in open source licensing, that would of course break the maintainer burnout cycle — but I’m certainly not holding my breath.
But I do agree that this is the crux of the issue.
Blatantly untrue. Companies riding the coattails of the opensource moniker for PR points while using restrictive licenses is what garners all the hate. It's essentially fraud committed to garner good press.
The other thing that gets people riled up is companies with a CLA that they claim is for responsible stewardship suddenly pulling a fast one and relicensing the project to a non-OSI license. It's perfectly legal but it tends to upset people.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with source available software at any level of restriction. Just be very clear about what it is and isn't.
See also: “Npm should remove the default license from new packages” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43864518
Such a license does not comply with your requirements; yet, it is also valid under case law, even if it is statistically unlikely to permit enforcement against most claimed evils. Each society has certain evils that are widely accepted by the courts, so it certainly isn’t a get out of all possible jails free card.
The purpose of a license is to inform of the rights available. The user is responsible for evaluating the license, or for trusting the judgment of a third party if they are uninterested in evaluating themselves.
If the author’s entire license “This is free software for free uses, please contact me for a paid license for paid uses” then that is statistically likely to be court enforceable against exploitation, so long as the terms offered are reasonable to the judge and any expert witnesses called. The Free Software Foundation does not have exclusive rights to the words “free software”. Adoption will be much reduced for someone who writes such a license, of course, and perhaps someone will exploit a loophole that a lengthier outsourced license would have covered. Neither of those outcomes are necessarily worth the time and effort to try and prevent, especially when use of any open source license guarantees the right of exploitation for unshared profit in plain language versus the homegrown one which does not.
(I am not your lawyer, this is not legal advice.)
Using a license that allows the software to be distributed and modified, while placing restrictions or exemptions to those permissions outside of the license, at the very least sends mixed signals. My point is that if the author wants to make those restrictions, that's fine, but the license is the correct place for it. What's shitty from my moral perspective is using a commonly accepted free software license for marketing purposes, but then judging people for not following some arbitrary demands. If anything, _that_ is the unethical behavior.
"we ask (but not demand, these are words on the internet, not word of law) that you not remove the Anubis character from your deployment"
For whatever reason somebody decided to blow it out of proportion here on hn.
You're ignoring the possibility that users of the software might not agree with the author's wishes. There's nothing unethical about that.
A request to not change a part of the software is the same as a request to not use the software in specific industries, or for a specific purpose. There are many projects that latch on open source for brand recognition, but then "forbid" the software to be used in certain countries, by military agencies, etc. If the author wants to restrict how the software can be used, then it's not libre software.
I don't believe it is possible to reconcile these ethical views, as a ethical subjectivist.
Edit to add, an example of a non-contradictory request might be to contribute monetarily in proportion to the financial benefit you derive. It's an additional non-binding request to help sustain the community which seems reasonably consistent with the ethos of opensource to me.
The issue is that opensource is a movement that comes with a set of values attached. The licenses aren't impersonal the way the copyright system at large is.
I'm seeing this sentiment multiple times on this thread - "fine, it's legal, but it's still wrong!"
That's an extremely disrespectful take on someone adhering to a contract that both parties agreed to. You are using shaming language to pressure people into following your own belief system.
In this specific instance, the author could have chosen any damn license they wanted to. They didn't. They chose one to get the most adoption.
You appear to want both:
1. Widespread adoption
and
2. Restrict what others can do.
The MIT license is not compatible with #2 above. You can ask nicely, but if you don't get what you want you don't get to jump on a fucking high horse and religiously judge others using your own belief system.
Author should have used GPL (so any replaced images get upstreamed back and thus he has control) OR some other proprietary license that prevents modifications like changing the image.
A bunch of finger-pointers gabbing on forums about those "evil" people who stick to both the word and the spirit of the license are nothing more than the modern day equivalent of witch-hunters using "intent" to secure a prosecution.
Be better than that - don't join the mob in pointing out witches. We don't need more puritans.
For example, if an employee does something hostile towards society at their employer when they have the freedom to choose not to do so — and since employment is at will, they always have that freedom to choose — I will tend to judge their antisocial actions unethical, even if their contract allows it. (This doesn’t mean I will therefore judge the person as unethical! One instance does not a pattern make, etc.)
So, for me, ethical judgments are not opt-out under any circumstance, nor can they be abrogated by contract or employment or law. I hold this is a non-negotiable position, so I will withdraw here; you’re welcome to continue persuading others if you wish.
I didn't claim it does, I am claiming that since ethics is subjective and the contract is not, you subjecting your moral standard to others is no different than a mob subjecting an old woman to accusations of being a witch.
Now, you may not have a problem publicly judging others, but your actions are barely different from those of the Westboro Baptist Church.
IOW, sure, you are allowed to publicly condemn people who hold different moral beliefs to you, but the optics are not good for you.
"no different than a mob subjecting an old woman to accusations of being a witch."
Well, you're not being driven out of your village or being executed... Also the person you're replying to has beeing rather polite. Hardly a witch hunt is it?
"barely different from those of the Westboro Baptist Church"
The church that interrupts the grieving of the families of dead soldiers to shout about how much they hate gay people? You seriously believe that the person you're repling to is "barely different" from that?
"IOW, sure, you are allowed to publicly condemn people who hold different moral beliefs to you, but the optics are not good for you."
You're literally condeming them for having different moral beliefs than you right now, while being much more accusatory about it, comparing them to some really vile people. I wonder how you feel the optics of this reflects on you, because I don't think it's good for you.
Why are you so offended that someone might judge you for ignoring the friendly request of someone giving you something for free?
I obviously disagree; smearing a veneer of civility over thought-policing does not make that thought policing any more acceptable.
> You're literally condeming them for having different moral beliefs than you right now,
You also appear to be claiming that, when being policed by puritans, one should politely put up with it. I also disagree - I don't think puritanical holier-than-thou comments deserve more civility than they give.
> I wonder how you feel the optics of this reflects on you, because I don't think it's good for you.
People pointing out thought-policing always look good ;-)
The ones who are crusading for it tend to look bad. I'm not too worried.
In this case upstreaming replaced images wouldn't be useful to the author anyway, they are going to keep the anime image.
In this case, it would be, because (presumably) the new images are the property of the user, and they would hardly want (for example) their company logo to be accidentally GPL'ed.
Sure, you can say it’s unethical in that it directly contravenes their request - I won’t argue that - but it’s the smallest of violations.
As far as I can see it’s MIT licensed so you have no legal obligation otherwise. If they truly cared about people keeping the character, they should have made the request with teeth.
I don’t even understand why they made the request in the first place. The nature of the request makes it seem as though it isn’t actually important at all, so why make the request at all? It just puts everyone else in an uncomfortable position. If keeping the character is important, then why release it under MIT license?
https://git.kernel.org/ changed theirs