Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by chiggsy 1638 days ago
There is no such context. The licence specifies clearly and completely the terms of use. You cannot handwave an unwritten "social context" into existence, that adds and obligation to the creators that their licence explicitly refused to accept. What you get, of course, is the actual source code.

It's understandable that you would assume such a spurious obligation, human history is full of references to such obligations, up until the age of Big Data, which is when we realized that most of these assumptions were false. It's been a painful time for all of us.

In fact, the actual obligation is yours, if you decided to use this logging library. Seems there was a severe vulnerability in the code. It also seems that the people who responsibly forked the code, ran their own security audit, discovered the vulnerability and then patched decided not to make their contributions known to the general community of users of the software. They, if they exist, seem to be acting as if no obligations exist with respect to the code they acquired.

Speaking of assumptions, your proposed actions regarding your employment assume that your boss was obligated to tell you the reason your contract was terminated. Again, no such obligation exists. They can't fire you out of disgust for your Satanism, or because of your Innuit heritage, or because there are ambiguities regarding your gender. Luckily for them, at-will employees can be terminated, well, at-will, so there is no need for them to specify that it was not, in fact, because of your quite stylish haircut. Your public postings might in fact earn you a letter from the legal department, since you have no way of knowing the real reason was that you downloaded logging code on to mission critical servers, and lacked either the inclination or capacity to verify this internet code, and then when asked about your decision to do this thing, you quoted an imaginary "social context," an unwritten, unknown construct, that in this case silently tacks on the term "users of this library will receive free, unpaid support in perpetuity" that functioned exactly like Adam Keynes "invisible hand," that is, some rationalization to absolve you of the responsibility for explaining problematic aspects of the mental model used in your decision making. This was a vast surprise to the administrators of your company, who, understandably, know very little about logging libraries, which is why they hired someone to provide the required functionality.