Il 13/03/2015 18:36, Tim Landscheidt ha scritto:
(anonymous) wrote:

[...]
To be clear: I'm not going to make my code proprietary in
any way. I just wanted to know whether I'm entitled to ask
for the source of every Labs bot ;-)
Everyone is entitled to /ask/, but I don't think you have a
right to /receive/ the source :-).

What's the purpose of open source then? (Apart from the two you mentioned)


AFAIK, there are two main reasons for the clause:

a) WMF doesn't want to have to deal with individual licences
    that may or may not have the potential for litigation
    ("The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil").  With
    requiring OSI-approved, tried and true licences, the risk
    is negligible.

b) Bots and tools running on an infrastructure financed by
    donors, like contributions to Wikipedia & Co., shouldn't
    be usable for blackmail.  Noone should be in a legal po-
    sition to demand something "or else ..."  The perpetuity
    of OS licences guarantees that everyone can be truly
    thankful to developers without having to fear that other-
    wise they shut down devices, delete content, etc.

But the nice thing about collaboratively developed open
source software is that it usually is of a better quality,
so clandestine code is often not that interesting.

Tim



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