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Licenses are code; tricky to the point of being analogous to cryptographic algorithms. Writing a custom one often creates unintended consequences. For instance, as currently worded, even with the best of intentions, a web developer might deploy the package believing themselves to be in full compliance with the license, then later learn that a site user is non-compliant; this new knowledge causes the developer to become immediately non-compliant.
Other than a return to a standard MIT license or one of the others listed at https://pkg.go.dev/license-policy, I don't have any good suggestions for what to do about this; I don't know of any standard open-source licenses that satisfy the full intent of the current license. That doesn't mean there aren't any -- the JSON license, for instance, is on the pkg.go.dev list, and is an MIT derivative that tries to do the right thing. Here's a related conversation on a stack exchange site that covers some of the issues in more detail: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/199055/open-source-licenses-that-explicitly-prohibit-military-applications
The text was updated successfully, but these errors were encountered:
stevegt
changed the title
nonstandard license creates uncertainty
license creates uncertainty
Sep 20, 2020
stevegt
changed the title
license creates uncertainty
current license creates uncertainty
Sep 20, 2020
Licenses are code; tricky to the point of being analogous to cryptographic algorithms. Writing a custom one often creates unintended consequences. For instance, as currently worded, even with the best of intentions, a web developer might deploy the package believing themselves to be in full compliance with the license, then later learn that a site user is non-compliant; this new knowledge causes the developer to become immediately non-compliant.
Other than a return to a standard MIT license or one of the others listed at https://pkg.go.dev/license-policy, I don't have any good suggestions for what to do about this; I don't know of any standard open-source licenses that satisfy the full intent of the current license. That doesn't mean there aren't any -- the JSON license, for instance, is on the pkg.go.dev list, and is an MIT derivative that tries to do the right thing. Here's a related conversation on a stack exchange site that covers some of the issues in more detail: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/199055/open-source-licenses-that-explicitly-prohibit-military-applications
The text was updated successfully, but these errors were encountered: