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[-] ramenshaman@lemmy.world 71 points 1 year ago

Pardon my ignorance but how do you steal code if it's open source?

[-] hperrin@lemmy.world 220 points 1 year ago

You don’t follow the license that it was distributed under.

Commonly, if you use open source code in your project and that code is under a license that requires your project to be open source if you do that, but then you keep yours closed source.

[-] fidodo@lemmy.world 43 points 1 year ago

I still wouldn't call it stealing, but I guess "broke open source code licenses" doesn't have the same impact, but I'd prefer accuracy.

[-] bamboo@lemm.ee 92 points 1 year ago

It’s piracy, distributing copyrighted works against the terms of its license. I agree stealing is not really the right word.

[-] tb_@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Distributing it would be one thing, but profiting off it?

[-] thanks_shakey_snake@lemmy.ca 23 points 1 year ago

I think it makes the most sense to think of it like stealing the way plagiarism is stealing.

[-] KeenFlame@feddit.nu 13 points 1 year ago

I wouldn't call pirating stealing either so

[-] Even_Adder@lemmy.dbzer0.com 76 points 1 year ago

He took GPLv3 code, which is a copyleft license that requires you share your source code and license your project under the same terms as the code you used. You also can't distribute your project as a binary-only or proprietary software. When pressed, they only released the code for their front end, remaining in violation of GPLv3.

[-] Miaou@jlai.lu 5 points 1 year ago

Probably the reason they're moving to a Web offering. They could just take down the binary files and be gpl compliant, this whole thing is so stupid

[-] Kusimulkku@lemm.ee 5 points 1 year ago

I think that's what AGPL tries to prevent

[-] sukhmel@programming.dev 4 points 1 year ago

Yes, but if the code they took is not AGPL then this loophole still applies

[-] Kusimulkku@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago

Yes, I meant more that AGPL was created to plug this particular loophole. As in, if it was AGPL, they couldn't do this.

[-] sukhmel@programming.dev 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

That's true

Although I personally am not a fan of licences this strict, MIT+Apache2.0 seems good enough for me. Of course, that might change with time and precedents like this 😅

this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2024
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