I flagged because perennial complaining about the license is boring, adds nothing of value to the conversation, and just leads to the same tired series of arguments.

It is quite possible that the author isn't aware that "all rights reserved" is the default and intended the license to be more open.

If they do want to keep it proprietary, it would be nice to make that explicit.

Are you proposing that people who want to use this code should just assume they can do so, violate the implied copyright, and accept the associated risk?

Yes, that is exactly what I'm proposing.

You're talking about a library of markdown files for your own personal use to practice writing some code, posted to github, and includes a bunch of language about how to contribute, explicit instructions to fork it, etc.

Imagine giving a flying shit about the lack of a license, in that context. Couldn't be me.

The lack of a license file is by several orders of magnitude the least interesting thing about this repo.

So it's the nature of the repo for you, then. Presumably you wouldn't take the same position if the repo contained a substantial software system.

> Imagine giving a flying shit about the lack of a license, in that context. Couldn't be me.

Some of us are accountable to other people for these kinds of things. One comment mentioned possibly using this for a team transitioning to Go. In that context, license can matter. Having explicit authorization to use it changes it from an open question that can raise concerns, to something you don't have to worry about.

Btw well done on adding to the "perennial complaining about the license". The top comment made a perfectly reasonable request, that may have been useful to the OP author. It wasn't a complaint. You could have just not commented. And flagging was an obnoxious choice.

You're afoul of these, from the HN guidelines:

>Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

Complaining about the license falls under this. Someone asked my it was flagged, I answered. One flag isn't enough to kill a comment, btw. I was far from the only one who flagged.

>Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

Complaining about why I flagged is discouraged.

Do better.

MIT and CC-BY-4.0 are the industry standards for code snippets and documentation, respectively.

If the author intends for the work to be copyleft, non-commercial, or a combination of those, there are specific licenses within the Creative Commons family that satisfy those requirements. These are already widely used for open-source books on GitHub.

This is why I suggested "any Creative Commons licenses" rather than a specific one. My goal wasn't to spark an argument over which one is the "best", but rather to provide the author with options to choose from, depending on their specific needs.

>My goal wasn't to spark an argument over which one is the "best", but rather to provide the author with options to choose from, depending on their specific needs.

GitHub has Issues and Pull Request features for exactly this purpose.