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by sanderjd 4788 days ago
I'm curious - have you been burned by issues with licenses in the past? I've never had licensing affect me in any tangible way and so they are really more of a vague theoretical, and thus low priority, concern for me. But I am vaguely aware that this is theoretically the wrong position to have while yours is the right one.
3 comments
niggler 4788 days ago
It's better to be safe than sorry, as the saying goes. I've never been burned personally. I'm also pretty sure that anyone working for a large software company is warned about using third party code or snippets found on expertsexchange or stackoverflow or random blogs.

Normally people are well intentioned, but sometimes you stumble upon repos with very strange licenses (for example, a javascript repo that has operating system restrictions https://github.com/stephen-hardy/xlsx.js/issues/8 ).

It's usually not of a concern for most people working on small projects (after all, another party has to notice and then decide to take action), but if you are trying to enter an industry with a highly litigious incumbent then you should make sure your ducks are in a row first.

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sanderjd 4788 days ago
That all makes perfect sense. I think I misread your original comment somewhat - I read it as "licenses are the #1 thing I consider when evaluating projects", rather than "of the projects I decide not to use after evaluating, licenses are the #1 reason for that decision", which isn't the same thing at all.
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3pt14159 4788 days ago
When my company was getting aquired we sent them the license details of some 50 projects as part of the DD, the lawyers emailed back and said to only include licenses to things we that were either not open source or that were substantial to the tech stack. SciPy, NumPy, Python, and GNU/Linux was all that was sent.
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chimeracoder 4788 days ago
> I'm curious - have you been burned by issues with licenses in the past?

If you count "not being allowed to use $LIBRARY because your company's lawyers won't let you use improperly code", then this is incredibly common.

The alternative scenario - using code released under an ambiguous license and then later getting sued for it - is much less common with large companies simply because good legal teams won't let that happen (see the above scenario).

I'm sure there have been examples of it, though - I know I've heard of those stories myself, even; I just can't think of them at the moment.

Unfortunately, it seems that most FOSS code on Github is not actually properly licensed: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/04/18/github_licensing_stu...

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