57
This is explicitly addressed in the Visual Studio Code FAQ:
Why does Visual Studio Code have a different license than the vscode GitHub repository?
To learn why Visual Studio Code, the product, has a different license than vscode, the open source GitHub repository, see issue #60 for a detailed explanation.
In that issue, a vscode developer explains:
When ...
41
As far as I am aware, all FLOSS licenses that deal with copyright notices only require the preservation of notices that exist. Each author had the opportunity to add their own name to header when they made their contribution. If they chose not to do so, there is no existing notice from that author to preserve. There is never (as far as I know) any ...
36
Consider the obvious analogy (from which the term flows - pun intended) ... water in a river flows 'downstream' and thus 'upstream' is the source from which the water comes.
This analogy is deeply embedded in software development, so it's no mere coincidence that we use terms like 'head', 'source', 'upstream', 'downstream' and even 'flow' extensively in the ...
26
Nothing prevents charging for open source software. In fact, if a license forbids charging for the software, it is not free/open-source, because it violates the freedom to distribute.
Charging for open source software may seem pointless, because once the author has sold it to someone, they can't prevent the buyer from making as many copies as they like and ...
answered Jun 26 '15 at 19:02
Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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26
Short answer: because the CC licenses have not been designed for software and source code.
This is answered by Creative Commons themselves in their FAQ:
Unlike software-specific licenses, CC licenses do not contain specific
terms about the distribution of source code, which is often important
to ensuring the free reuse and modifiability of software. ...
21
It's correct but unnecessary. It's there for clarity.
When you do some work, the default copyright position is all rights reserved. Nobody can do anything with your work without your express permission, or a license to do so.
The MIT license is your license to other people, to make it clear what they can do. However, any rights not explicitly granted by ...
19
Since you have never looked at the source code, and ONLY looked at:
The API
The no-code very high-level description of the synchronization algorithm
then you are free to release your implementation under any license you want.
Just like SAMBA checked the API and algorithms of CIFS and released their software under the license they wanted.
Or at least, ...
18
Oddly enough, I just did this with two repos I wanted to ensure continued access to. So no, it's not a silly idea.
However, remember that you have now committed yourself to monitoring the upstream (original) repository, and regularly pulling any new commits to keep your fork up to date.
You may also wish to put an explanation in the Description field ...
16
"Stealing" code is copyright infringement, which is obviously avoided by most legitimate companies. Losing a copyright infringement suit can easily destroy most companies. On the other hand, without patents, reverse-engineering and feature-matching is perfectly legal and done all the time. Some unethical companies can very well be doing the former ...
15
For Debian you can proceed as follows:
Post an Intent to Package (ITP) bug report to the Debian Bug
Tracking system (https://www.debian.org/Bugs/). Or if an existing
RFP (Request for Packaging) bug report for the software already
exists, you can assign it to yourself.
Create the packaging for the software.
Upload the software and the packaging to ...
14
The binaries distributed by Microsoft are non-free. The source code, being released under the MIT license, is free software (or "open-source") as poorly called. If you downloaded and compiled the source code from GitHub, the resulting binary would be free. The binary's license doesn't matter so long as the source code carries the fundamental freedoms and ...
13
Thanks to the work of Peter Squicciarini (@pajamaboat), you can now download 100% FLOSS binaries compiled from VSCode's official MIT-licensed repository.
It is called VSCodium as a reference to the Chrome/Chromium relationship:
https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium
The build scripts are also available so you can do it yourself and verify the resulting ...
13
Was the software(before 1970's) released with free source?
Well, there was surely software released with and without free source, and lots of machine code software where the distinction was of minor concern, but I guess the point is the majority of software was released without a written license.
Moreover, don't forget at that time there was no internet, ...
12
In the 3D graphics world, there are free-licensed models, textures, and the like. When building a 3D graphical work, they're the rough equivalents of code libraries and the like.
There's also the open-source hardware movement (OpenCores, RepRap, etc.), though particularly in computing hardware, the line between "software" and "not software" gets a bit ...
12
This might take a while, your question isn't a short one, and it seems to me to have a number of misconceptions in it.
I frequently create programs [...] in other script languages, such as PHP (PHP License) and Perl (Perl Artistic License, or GPL v1+)
The licences you quote are those which apply to the languages themselves. With the exception of a very ...
11
There may be a number of ways, but there is no guarantee.
If you have enough certainty, you could start a legal case and ask for sources to be disclosed. This in fact happened in the SCO case.
If you can reverse-engineer the code, and show that it has non-trivial code that is exactly like yours, that would help. Whether it would convince a judge and a jury ...
11
Your question is very unclear and confused, but the simple answer is: before the 1970s, software wasn't copyrightable in the US, so the very idea of "licensing" doesn't apply. You cannot put a copyright license on something that isn't copyrightable.
In the US, companies started to argue that computer program source code was protected as a literary work, and ...
10
@FaheemMitha already gave a perfect answer for Debian, but I wanted to add the process for Ubuntu. If a package is included in Debian, it will automatically be included in Ubuntu shortly down the road:
Ubuntu regularly incorporates source packages from Debian, so it is encouraged to upload a package to Debian first to automatically have it in Ubuntu in ...
10
With the recent demise of Google Code, I've strived to get a lot of popular repositories that I may potentially use, and host copies of them on Github, or on my own personal computer.
I don't really do anything with them, nor do they get any activity. They're just... there. If people are interested, you can ask them to make a fork. I suppose you could put a ...
10
If you were given software under some Foo License, you may copy, distribute, and modify the software under the terms of the Foo License.
If the distributor of that software stops giving out new copies under the Foo License, that does not change the fact that you did receive a copy of it under the Foo License. As long as the licensor does not actively revoke ...
9
I want to make sure in no way am I liable for any issues, and that my code cannot simply be copied and claimed as someone else's.
You want a license that includes a disclaimer of liability (often in ALL CAPS) and requires maintaining attribution. Virtually any mainstream open source license will include both of these. The MIT license is perfectly suitable ...
8
An open source license is a grant from the copyright holder to someone else, giving them additional rights. If I give you the rights to version 2 of my work, I don't have to give you rights to use version 3 of my work, because it's mine. If version 2 is GPL, version 3 can be BSD licensed, closed source, or only available to Martians, that's up to me.
Now, ...
8
The same way as you know any other program is not actually a virus/malware/etc.
You might trust organization x not to publish malware pretending to be something else. You might trust that it's a well known product that wouldn't contain malware. You might perform static analysis.
This is no different than with propriety software.
8
This is categorically fine under the MIT license (as long as you follow basic attribution and license-preservation requirements), since the MIT license allows you to distribute the work (and modified forms) in binary-only format if you wish. If the binary happens also to produce source code, that's fine too, but it doesn't have to do so.
For the GPL, this ...
8
You should not include keys in your open source project. You should include a file location where your code expects a key, and the user (or an included utility) creates or copies their own unique key into the expected location. Imagine a thousand people download your project and stand up their own versions of your open-source server -- what's the point of ...
8
You are not generally required[1] to release any secret keys necessary to make an application run. Instead, users can obtain their own key.
However, redacting your source code is not a suitable approach, for the primary reason that this is inconvenient and risky for you. When you publish a new version of the code you have to make sure to always redact it. ...
8
There're several different JRE available with different licenses. Two most prominent are:
OpenJDK is open-source (GPL). You can use it without having to pay for it.
Oracle JRE use different license (https://www.oracle.com/downloads/licenses/oracle-javase-license.html). I am not a lawyer, but as far as I understand, it is still free for usage.
As for JDK, ...
8
To quote from Wikipedia:
Copyright does not cover ideas and information themselves, only the form or manner in which they are expressed.
So the copyright in what you've written covers the creative aspect of what you've written, but not the idea(s) therein expressed. If the code is entirely your own work, then as far as copyright is concerned, you are ...
7
Plausible, an open source alternative to Google analytics, released a blog post detailing their move from MIT licensing to the AGPL (Affero GNU Public License).
In it, they have the following claim:
Here are a couple of events that made us aware of the risks with a permissive open source license:
There’s been at least one case where a corporation has taken ...
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