mirabilos

There is still quite some amount of hubris in this.

If A writes software under L0 and gives it to B and is “nice enough” to allow B to use it privately for free, there’s some entitlement to the software.,

You’re overlooking that, in a contemporary environment, you’re standing on the shoulders of the giants (and all the small ones) who came before you. It’s absolutely presumptuous to write code in our time and not publish it under an OSS licence.

It’s misleading because it pretends that you need zero licences for it.

Nor is it Ⓕ Copyfree compatible, and none of the BSDs would ever touch it either.

So that leaves you with adaption by unwashed unorganised masses who wouldn’t care about licence terms at all.

Just find something that brings bread on the table. Doesn’t even have to be software-related, could be, idfk, gardening.

Eh, you can use a fixed-width font in GUI apps, too. In Kontact, for example, you just press “x”.

FixedMisc is still the best font

meh, give me ed over vi and emacs any day

“modern” seems to be a curse word these days, all the time I find it being used it’s used to describe something despicable like the systemd ecosystem.

Slack? Ugh.

When my employer turned off the company-internal Jabber server in favour of, out of all things, Hipchat, I moved my team mates to IRC. (They also seem to all know at least some vi, even the trainee.)

I am the author. And I am not an academic interested in bringing out a lengthy article with explaining the interpretations and all.

I am, in this instance, pragmatic: explaining what’s bad, why it’s bad, what we need to do right now, and that’s it, and now I’m trying to work on a solution with the GitHub people.

If this is not enough, do your own research. In my referrers, there have popped up some Russian sites that (according to Google Translate) did some of their own research (and came to similar conclusions). Ex-Debian’s joeyh did, too.

Sorry about that, I was more concerned with getting the explanation into more than 140 chars and out to both people and GitHub and getting in touch with GitHub than with writing a lengthy article.

And all this besides $dayjob which suffered on the day, so I’ll probably need to work the weekend to catch up.

The licence per se is not disallowed.

If you create a work from scratch and decide to put it under GPL and upload it to GitHub (thus granting extra rights), that’s just fine.

It’s only you cannot currently upload SOMEONE ELSE’s GPL’d work (including your own derivate thereof) to GitHub.

True. But CC0 is deprecated by CC themselves and CC requested the OSI to not approve it. It is unclear whether there will be a successor.

But any of the BSD/MIT-ish licences should be close enough to a “gift” for this to work (well they do protect the author/licensor a bit more, but…).

“how these rules came to be and what they try to achieve”

That’s not my point here.

The intent behind the rules and what they’re trying to achieve is GOOD and A STEP UP from the previous ToS.

HOWEVER, they have language that IS problematic for almost ALL copyleft and/or attribution-requiring works that include contributions from people who did not upload it directly to GitHub themselves. THAT’s what I’m discussing.

As things are right now: yes, especially for GPL works, “probably not” for BSD or MIT works.

I _am_ working with them to get it fixed, but they enacted the new terms prematurely, so _currently_ the mess is there.

This just shows that two lawyers did not even read my article and just comment on it demeaningly.

Please do note that D.5 also covers “reproduce”, which _is_ “distribution of code”, _and_ that I address this point in my article.

So, in short: If you need to give lots of money away, get a lawyer, but even then you’re not getting what you’re paying for. They also only cook with water, they also are just erring human meatbags.

Someone intelligently (hah) decided to link to the (1 MiB) page with the entire wlog posts of the last decade (plus CSS, webfonts, …) instead of to the permalink of the one article (15K), and then over https.

The webserver is a first-generation Celeron 2.4 GHz (Dell PowerEdge 750, AIUI) with 1 GiB of RAM, running MirBSD (not the fastest OS out there) with Apache. So, no surprise.

Yes, one of _those_ Celeron CPUs with so few L2 cache it can be discounted as having none.

For that, it does remarkably well (though 「ls -l /var/www/logs/」 surely shows the traffic ).

But, thanks to the new ToS becoming effective immediately (as of 28½ hours ago), you do have to act.

Basically, starting March 2017, uploading anything (new) like that is not allowed. Removing repositories and/or the entire user account, to make it explicit that such grants are not given for what’s already there, may be prudent (yes, overreacting is not necessary, but acting is, and don’t talk legal requirements down to overreacting, because if you DO upload a GPLv2’d work to Github as things are now, YOU lose the right to use it under the GPLv2 in the first place and CANNOT get it back except from the (all!) authors).

BSD/MIT/etc. only require the licence text to be present, usually by retaining it in the source code or accompanying documentation. Yes, it’s close. No, I don’t want to go there and discuss this detail.

Github doesn’t, it just requires that of its users (that, or to not upload any copylefted works, or works under licences requiring attribution, which contain work from people who have not agreed to waive those requirements for Github).

Both the AGPL (“anciliary transmission”) and the law have exceptions for ISPs and other such scenarios.

Yes, that’s actually what GitHub and I are talking about now.

Any OSS licence already grants way enough rights for a hosting platform to operate, period. Anything else can be solved technically and does not need to involve legalities. (For example, when displaying search result snippets, put notices pointing to the original file in the original repository, as “context, complete copyright notices, licence and attributions” right next to each.)

So the ToS simply need to require all those grants only for works that are not under an OSS licence (see also my updated article, remember http://www.mirbsd.org/permalinks/wlog-10_e20170301-tg.htm is the correct link, NOT the one on top). For any works NOT under such an OSS (Open Knowledge, Free Cultural Work, whatever) licence, the ToS grant is not unjustified to ask (especially as GitHub doesn’t care about hosting OSS projects, or the licences of whatever content they host).

They actually had a review period, and did some good changes.

But then, they took a week to look at the reviews (ostensibly; I, as well as others, never got any response to them), went and made some minor changes (which were not enough to address the problems at all) AND BROUGHT THE CHANGED DOCUMENT INTO PRODUCTION RIGHT ON THE NEXT DAY, without any further review or warning. That’s like bad.

No, don’t use JIRA for developing OSS: https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/free-software-needs-free-tools

I’m in contact with them, as I wrote in the updated post.

Yes.

Any OSS licence fulfils the requirements EXCEPT for GitHub’s requirement to not add any requirements to the grant. See my updated post.

just ssh, git and gitweb will do.

Or self-hosted FusionForge if you need more fancy stuff.

As far as I can tell: no, unless GitHub takes taking excerpts from works too far and redistributing them without the licence attached. But nobody else is allowed to deal in those excerpts then, except via the original licence, so, likely not.

But 4-clause BSD and similar advertising clauses are _probably_ affected, and Apache 2 _when_ a NOTICE text file exists is _very likely_ affected. (Maybe even without; the Apache 2 licence requires giving recipients a copy of the licence text, too.)

Interestingly enough, this _might_ apply to paid repositories unless you pay for having different ToS apply to you.

The plain body text is under The MirOS Licence, so that’s fine. For more, see http://www.mirbsd.org/LICENCE

Thanks, it was indeed a bit of load

I updated the article in the meanwhile since I am in contact with people at GitHub, trying to convince them to change things to the better ;)

http://sprunge.us/TCaI is a mirror, in case my Apache goes down.