The methodology behind this graph is really rudimentary, as the original author admits[1], and I wish people would stop quoting it without big health warnings.
"To detect what license, if any, a project is licensed under, we used an open source Ruby gem called Licensee to compare the repository's LICENSE file to a short list of known licenses. However, it's important to note that this approach doesn't count a project as licensed if the README indicates a specific license or if individual project files contain a named license in the code comments."
Of my 13 (original, non-forked) projects on github, 11 state a licence; each one would be immediately found by a human looking at the project; not a single one would be found by the above method.
Hell, you can't use GNU Autotools without a COPYING file or it will yell at you until you create it or figure out the incantation to make it ignore the lack of said file. There's still plenty of software out there on github that uses automake/autoconf that wouldn't be properly recognized like this.
The conclusions of this article are wrong. The vast majority of Github repositories with no license are those that also have no followers and no stars. These are repositories with little useful code most likely.
I more useful metric would be to measure repositories that have 10 or more stars or followers, and to see what percentage of such repositories have no software license.
As it is, the whole digression into the failed state metaphor is premature. The author should have done some digging for better supporting stats before spending so much time on a stretched failed state metaphor.
It would also be interesting to look at the inverse relationship - how many average stars does a "licensed" repository have vs an "unlicensed" one. I suspect that you're right that repositories with licenses will have more stars, and thus more widely used.
Another interesting metric would be lines of code (licensed vs. unlicensed). This would probably make your argument more obvious... more useful repositories will have many more lines of code than unuseful ones; and thus also more likely to have a license.
I believe that the author may have just re-discovered the concept of the long tail, reproduced in source code repositories.
One could also argue, that people, who use code from a repository without a license, don't want to make that fact publicly known. That kind of usage might be illegal, so following or staring that repository might be similar to admitting a crime. Therefore, your metric could have a large selection bias.
While the metrics might be, let's say, questionable as it would make more sense to consider only repositories with a minimum number of followers, a minimum number of commits and the like, the statement
> So, if you are like me and you don't care about all the intellectual property antics, here's my project, feel free to use it. If you are the kind of moron who wants to have their legal ass covered, go screw yourself.
"Open Source" means different things to different people and not everyone accepts the OSI definition, there are even people who are angry at ESR for grabbing the phrase for himself and making his definition the most popular one.
esr didn't coin the term, Christine Peterson did, and Tim O'Reilly funded the OSI compaign. Also, nobody used the term before OSI did, except with an unrelated meaning in the intelligence community.
>"Open Source" means different things to different people
And those people are wrong. The OSI definition is the definition. Those that want it to mean something else are trying to fool people, which we call "open washing."
Yeah, it seems like he doesn't understand the basics of the law in this area which makes the Somalia analogy pretty ignorant.
To expand on what you said: the term open source has a specific meaning and it doesn't mean "the source is available". From Wikipedia:
> "Open-source software (OSS) is computer software with its source code made available with a license in which the copyright holder provides the rights to study, change, and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose."
Once upon a time most of the JDK had the source available - with all rights reserved. It was emphatically not OSS.
Even though that is the predominant interpretation of "open source" in the tech community, I think one could argue that the term "open source" has no legal meaning (outside of a license agreement, that is). So for the purposes of this argument (code w/o a license), the term is meaningless.
I am one of those who (would) publish their code source-open, but not Open Source. The reason is not that I reject the legal system per se (although I do dislike and fundamentally criticize it). The reason is that publishing code without a license gives me the effect I want.
People can look at my code, they can use it privately and do whatever they want. They cannot build a business with it or use it in any way I don't like without my permission. Yes, people with a contempt of copyright law (which tend to align with me politically a bit) profit from this. People who have internalized copyright law and won't even look at my unlicensed code in secret, on their phone on the toilet, because it's 'wrong', are disadvantaged. That's great!
Most importantly, I don't give any rights away. "All rights reserved" is the default. And I don't enter any obligations. Remember, we like to talk about licenses that are attached to code. But how are they implemented? In reality, licenses are in fact like contracts between you and the license taker. I'm extremely hesitant to sign contracts with strangers - I especially don't want to offer a blanket contract to everybody who reads my code and wants to accept it. I can't be 100% sure that such a contract doesn't create any obligations for me that I don't want - the legal system is so complicated that even lawyers have problems finding all side effects of clauses. At the very least, I'll be giving courses of action away if I license my code.
Without a license, putting code online is a bit like writing a poem in a park. People can look over your shoulder, read what you're writing, you can interact with them if you like, they can take your words and pass them on - but they can't publish a book with them, and you have no obligations towards those people.
>
"Then why don't you put that promise in writing? It's called a License."
Because the author of this particular source code strongly prefers users who like them who are ignorant of the law? The author doesn't want to get sued for his license.
Possibly its not his code. For a good time go to github and look for blowfish implementations in C and try to figure out which are original and which are cut and paste of Schneier. Schneier of course offers a blowfish written by him in C with no license or patent so if its cut and pasted into a licensed larger project you got problems. Or you can reimplement and put your reimplementation under your own choice of license, possibly not as well as Schneier.
Another good reason for no license is a very nice and polite "go away". This is just to show I use social media to get a checkmark on some hiring list and get a job and has no purpose beyond that.
What most likely will happen is that if the person likes you (IE: not some big company), they will allow you to use their code. If you are a huge corporation profiting from it, you will get sued for misuse.
This is exactly why you don't use unlicensed code in any commercial application.
So if you are one of the people he 'likes' and will allow you to use his code, then does he give you a license? If he likes you, he would give you a license, which describes how you can use the code without getting sued.
But I thought by putting it on GitHub, and claiming that he doesn't believe in licenses, because he wants EVERYONE to be able to use the code -- that he wouldn't then 'allow' a special friend to use the code.
> So, the other possibility is that authors deliberately reject the legal system per se. The reasoning can go as follows: I do care about my peers using my software. I don't give a damn about whether the lawyers and mega-corporations they work for use it. So, if you are like me and you don't care about all the intellectual property antics, here's my project, feel free to use it. If you are the kind of moron who wants to have their legal ass covered, go screw yourself.
I totally buy the idea that at least some users who upload source to GitHub without a license feel that way. I have slightly different priorities (creating software that is used is more important to me than avoiding the copyright antics) but I'm pretty sympathetic to that sentiment.
The problem with expressing that sentiment by not licensing your software is that it doesn't express that sentiment at all, especially on GitHub. GitHub's terms of use require that public repositories contain only open source code, so there's an argument to be made that uploading your code to a public repo on GitHub implies an open source license.
If you really want to make a civilly-disobedient statement rejecting the idea of licenses, I'd do so with something like the Forget Users License[1].
There's nothing odd about publishing something on Github without licensing it.
For example, imagine you have an MVP for a failed startup idea. By throwing it up on Github other people can learn from your project. Potential employers can review your code.
But if someone wants to fork your code and try to launch an identical startup, they really should cut you in.
I think this is the best explanation per Occam's Razor. Licensing is often complex and a lot of developers would rather not think about, plus the alternative is that GitHub by default waives certain copyrights when publishing which might get them in trouble.
It'd be nice if more tooling yelled at you for trying to publish something without a license attached. As much as it annoys me about refusing to even generate a working configure script and Makefile without it, autotools enforcing a COPYING file's presence is a great idea.
Actually, if you upload something publically to github you give them permission to serve it publically, and to allow other people to read it and fork it. It's part of the Github T&Cs
Read it and fork it, but not to do things that any open source license would allow you to do, like put it on a USB stick and give that stick to a friend.
> It's going to be weird, but bear with me, I have a point to make…
> So, the other possibility is that authors deliberately reject the legal system per se.
I hope he's sarcastic because it's blindingly obvious to anyone who knows there's a copyright and published any stuff for other people to use. Reality is that if you publish something everybody can take it and use it. Copyright flies in the face of actual reality. So most people just ignore it. Consumers but also producers. Only lawyers still care. Nothing weird about it.
If you had a law that water is dry until explicitly declared wet by appropriate rightholder people would ignore that law in their daily lives if there were no enforcer around.
"Reality is that if you publish something everybody can take it and use it"
Patents are a (controversial) way to publish something without allowing others to use it.
So at least, there must be a (controversial) rationnale behind "publishing without allowing any use".
The interesting question is why would anyone make such a contradictory statement? Why would they make the code physically available to everyone and yet make it legally unavailable?
Why is that contradictory? That's how every piece of sample code in a book works; the book generally has a copyright statement at the beginning and no license on the code. That's how, for instance, Microsoft's sample code explicitly works: there's a license that clearly states you can't use it unless you make nontrivial modifications.
That's also how code under non-simple-permissive licenses works. If I post something under the AGPL, it's legally unavailable for many purposes. If I post it under GPLv2-only (as I would default to for, e.g., a kernel module), it's legally unavailable to even GPLv3-only software.
In my experience it's been pretty easy to ask the author and say "Hi, I'd like to use your code under this license, here's my use case, can you provide it under that license?", and a good chunk of the time they'll say "Sure." For that question, it doesn't really matter whether the software is under any license at all to start with.
Don't compare those of us living under the rule of international law adopted in Berne in 1886 with people in failed states.
Piggybacking on the thread. I am a person that would like to provide Open Source for personal use, non-profits and other Open Source projects, but I'd like to force commercial institutions to pay me some money or give back to community.
As far as I know, only dual licensing under a copyleft license (usually GPL or AGPL) and a paid proprietary license. It allows people to pay to avoid the copyleft.
That said, it works best for some kinds of software, since unlike commonly believed, the GPL doesn't require one to contribute back, only forward, so in some cases people might be allowed to modify it without sharing those changes.
By the way, if you follow the dual licensing route, you need to be careful about accepting contributions, as unless you make them sign a document saying so, you won't have the right to issue those paid licenses for that code.
I've had code on GH before without a license. It took a while to go through every file and add a license header. I know I could of used sed/awk and probably made life easier, but I didn't feel like it.
It's an interesting thesis, to say that law has failed because people believe so little in the law they see no reason to even make their intentions clear in a legally common manner.
And let's face facts here : he is right.
1) a common person making open source code cannot reasonably assume he will enjoy the protection of the legal system when others violate the licenses (just look at GPL enforcement efforts and their lack of results)
2) the power of the law to enforce these things in the first place is very limited. If you don't notice the abuse yourself (either because you do, or because it's pointed out to you), the law isn't going to do so either (this is in fact an important legal principle in western law : if no-one cares, it's not against the law, not even if there actually is a law against it. Note that in criminal cases the state can "care" in a legal sense, on behalf of someone else (e.g. a murder victim), but this cannot happen in civil cases. This becomes obvious in the case of contracts, for instance: feel free to violate contracts ("commit fraud"), if the other signatory to the contract agrees with your actions. I will advise you to get that agreement in writing though)
3) you can make mistakes which get you into hot water. For instance, if you accidentally relicense, or appear to relicense, code from a large company, that can get you in serious legal trouble.
4) in practice, such massive portions of the law are ridiculous and unenforceable, and these portions have expanded, and expanded, and expanded yet more over time. Effectively, following the law is not a realistic proposition, and nobody should be under the illusion that they're following the law, ESPECIALLY when facing the police, but also in all other cases (remember this when the police asks you questions. The answer is always the same : I refuse to answer except through my lawyer (and even then, take the fifth). Why ? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc )
You should always treat any situation as a negotiation. Even when there is a clear law against what the person you're talking to is about to do.
I remember coming to a law lecture. The professor had 3 bottles of Bols (a famously strong alcoholic drink in western Europe). Why ? Well, the case he had started in his second year of law study against the telecom monopoly had completed, 45 years later. He had won. For 45 years of regular legal efforts, he got 83 euros (enough for 3 bottles of bols and some fast food). It was extremely nice of him, but it really drove the point home for me : the law, by itself, is merely an argument in any negotiation, and not a very strong one.
So we have established:
1) the law will not help you against others, at best it will enable you to help yourself (for a price, not for free)
2) the law may work against you. Taking legal actions, no matter how small, is something you don't understand (not even experienced lawyers or even judges can understand their everyday actions in a legal sense). Adding a license is definitely a legal action you don't understand and is not risk-free.
And I would add that this is plainly visible:
3) a LOT of people openly violate the law in pretty much all aspects of life (as a tenant which recently changed apartments, I was yet again reminded of this last month, getting charged with replacement costs for consumables, which was explicitly mentioned in the contract, and in law, to be the landlord's problem. Mentioning that got me a 50% reduction in what I got charged, and I accepted. Realistically I would have accepted a 10% reduction in what I was charged)
So why would you put licenses on your own code ? Don't. It's a risk without reward. If you want to go on a crusade, then go ahead. Otherwise, just stay away.
I don't disagree with your assessment of the law, I just think you (and possibly OP) are looking at issue from the wrong POV. The point of adding a license is not to allow you to initiate legal action, it's to give others some assurance that you won't initiate legal action against them when they use your code.
And while adding a license might get you in trouble, so can not adding one - for example, if the code from that Big Corp is GPL-licensed.
with deference to venomsnake, a simpler explanation is that people are to cheap to pay for a github subscription and instead of keeping private code private just don't share the code. These folks aren't publishing code without a license, they aren't even publishing code with intentionality period.
Other code hosting platforms such as GitLab do exist. I find it plausible that people don't know about them, but if they're reading this comment now they do.
"To detect what license, if any, a project is licensed under, we used an open source Ruby gem called Licensee to compare the repository's LICENSE file to a short list of known licenses. However, it's important to note that this approach doesn't count a project as licensed if the README indicates a specific license or if individual project files contain a named license in the code comments."
Of my 13 (original, non-forked) projects on github, 11 state a licence; each one would be immediately found by a human looking at the project; not a single one would be found by the above method.
[1] https://github.com/blog/1964-open-source-license-usage-on-gi...