Item — HN Reader

> Stealing an open source repo

It's in poor taste for sure but let's not pretend that the chosen license is doing him any favors: https://github.com/mbeher2200/DarkHours/blob/813cf85/LICENSE

Hate to see people fall for the “fewer restrictions == more Free” fallacy. Profit-driven entities love when smart people publish MIT code that they can feed off of without giving anything back.

Nor is the copycat project prevented from using the name without a trademark. For instance one couldn't repackage Mozilla or Blender under those names:

- https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=75558938&caseSearchType=U...

- https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=85852073&caseSearchType=U...

4 comments

MIT license does not mean you can copy everything around the software, like the name of the product, and strip the license. There are still requirements in the license for the copyright notice to accompany the software.

Can confirm. I used to hate when people published their code under MIT instead of GPL. But now that I work at a startup that competes with a few open source offerings, I love having Claude check in on their progress and port the content over.

> But now that I work at a startup that competes with a few open source offerings, I love having Claude check in on their progress and port the content over.

I hope that eventually you gain from society exactly what you’ve given.

I see this sort of opinion on every AI thread and it's funny to me because that's exactly what AI is, and people don't seem to get mad about the general use case of it generating code but when it's asked to post a specific project over to license-wash it, suddenly people get mad, like, that's what AI was doing all along. And to get this out of the way first, maybe you don't use AI, but I'm speaking of general trends on HN.

He already is, any software that his company releases, people can just use an AI agent to replicate it and have their own version of.

The irony is that nobody is going to want to use software in the future that isn't open source. Why would I pay for software that I can't extend myself?

It will be absolutely hilarious when open source projects adopt the jqwik approach and start prompt injecting their code, comments, and any/all other text content. The LLM users’ histrionics will be delicious.

> I love having Claude check in on their progress and port the content over.

Genuine piece of shit, nice.

The solution is simple. Don't license your code MIT. MIT enables this

Absolutely and I don't disagree.

But locking the door is also the solution to getting your house ransacked because you left the entrance open; doesn't mean the robber isn't a piece of shit.

> Hate to see people fall for the “fewer restrictions == more Free” fallacy.

How is it a fallacy? The ability to pull in MIT/BSD code into a commercial product without providing the source is an extra freedom over (say) the GPL. The license does give end-users one more freedom than copyleft licenses?

Some folks may not like that extra bit of freedom, and want to put the restriction that you have to (re-)share the code — and that's fine — but it is less free.

It gives you the freedom to make others unfree, (by distributing software to them that they can’t inspect, modify, share) so it depends on whether you care about freedom for some individuals or freedom for everyone.

> The license does give end-users one more freedom than copyleft licenses?

IMO,the end-user is the person downloading and using the software from the app store, not the free-riding intermediary who repackages it. Copyleft ensures the end users can modify their software by guaranteeing access to its source code, and it accomplishes this by constraining any privileges of would-be intermediary repackagers from impinging this fundamental end-user right.

When judging which software offers more rights, you must first establish which party you prefer to have primacy: downstream developers, or the users of the software who run the released packages on their devices.

They still need to keep the conditions the mit sets though and keep the copyright notice.

> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software