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Comment by TheMagicHorsey | Hacker News Reader

The conclusions of this article are wrong. The vast majority of Github repositories with no license are those that also have no followers and no stars. These are repositories with little useful code most likely.

I more useful metric would be to measure repositories that have 10 or more stars or followers, and to see what percentage of such repositories have no software license.

As it is, the whole digression into the failed state metaphor is premature. The author should have done some digging for better supporting stats before spending so much time on a stretched failed state metaphor.

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It would also be interesting to look at the inverse relationship - how many average stars does a "licensed" repository have vs an "unlicensed" one. I suspect that you're right that repositories with licenses will have more stars, and thus more widely used.

Another interesting metric would be lines of code (licensed vs. unlicensed). This would probably make your argument more obvious... more useful repositories will have many more lines of code than unuseful ones; and thus also more likely to have a license.

I believe that the author may have just re-discovered the concept of the long tail, reproduced in source code repositories.

One could also argue, that people, who use code from a repository without a license, don't want to make that fact publicly known. That kind of usage might be illegal, so following or staring that repository might be similar to admitting a crime. Therefore, your metric could have a large selection bias.

While the metrics might be, let's say, questionable as it would make more sense to consider only repositories with a minimum number of followers, a minimum number of commits and the like, the statement

> So, if you are like me and you don't care about all the intellectual property antics, here's my project, feel free to use it. If you are the kind of moron who wants to have their legal ass covered, go screw yourself.

still holds a lot of truth.

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