[dwyer]

> one of the leading complaints being that it takes a lax approach to software licensing

I never understood this criticism. There's plenty of software I haven't bought a license for. I don't feel that just because somebody shares their code or archives it in public that I'm entitled to a free license.

That said, I've been approached on Github about licensing my code and I'm happy to grant one. For the most part, however, I just dump code to Github because it's a convenient way to backup and dealing with licenses just creates friction. I'd rather know that somebody out there explicitly wants the code before dealing with it.

[kijin]

Of course nobody is entitled to a free license.

But if somebody posts code on a website where most of the public content is under free licenses and the TOS explicitly dictates that you grant certain licenses to other users for free, I think we can all have a reasonable expectation that the code in question will also be under a free license. And if the expectation is broken without a clear indicator, that's a recipe for confusion.

[dwyer]

> most of the public content is under free licenses

Is it? I've read reports that all but a fraction of Github repos are single-commiter code dumps.

> the TOS explicitly dictates that you grant certain licenses to other users for free

Where?

https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of-service/

The only stipulation I see is:

> By setting your repositories to be viewed publicly, you agree to allow others to view and fork your repositories.

Unfortunately, the TOS doesn't provide a clear legal definition of fork. Does it go beyond clicking the fork button and copying the repo across Github servers? Does it including cloning the repo to a local disk? Or running the code? Or maintaining a derivative project?