On Sunday, August 21, 2016 at 12:11:26 PM UTC-4, [email protected] wrote:
>
> I gave a statement, on why I don't offer licenses. 
>

Not offering a license means that no one can copy, modify, or redistribute 
your code. 

Saying "Go bananas; use it, break it; embrace and extend it", while it 
gives some permissions, is actually not sufficient to qualify as open source 
<https://opensource.org/osd-annotated>.  For example, you don't explicitly 
give permission for people to sell it as part of commercial products, so as 
a result that usage is prohibited (by default).

It took many years for people in scientific computing to realize that 
licenses were important for example (and as a result the Netlib repository 
ended up having huge headaches), and there are other prominent examples of 
problems stemming from software without a license because the authors 
didn't think they needed one (e.g. qmail).   Learn from the bitter 
experiences of others!


Reply via email to