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Comment by yazaddaruvala | Hacker News Reader

Just an FYI: Always be careful!

I opened up a couple of these repos and some seem to have modifications on their licenses.

Some like OpenEXR say "BSD" but don't actually have a license file.

Others like, Ptex and Partio, have no mention of a license at all.

Edit: For anyone wondering why this is an issue. From a legal standpoint, there is a huge difference between being able to read the code, and being able to use the code.

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All those you mention do have licenses.

OpenEXR - https://github.com/openexr/openexr/blob/develop/OpenEXR/LICE...

Ptex - http://ptex.us/documentation.html

Partio - https://github.com/wdas/partio/blob/master/src/doc/license.t...

Cool, I'm glad, but still always be careful.

Meanwhile, I don't really have access to a lawyer and I'm curious:

1. Should I trust a license which is not distributed with the source code (i.e. on the hopefully official website)?

2. Should I trust a license which is in a sub-directory? My initial assumption is that, only that sub-directory is licensed.

IANAL (but I work often with them) and, about (2)... It'd depend mostly on how it's presented. You could either argue along your reasoning (only sub-directories are licensed) or say "it's right there in the 'documents' subdirectory that comes with the project, it's in another directory only to have things better organized, so all the project is licensed".

Probably you'd be able to find legal precedents for both arguments. Still, I agree with you that it's good to pay attention and understand the licenses (or get legal councel if you don't) if you're planning on doing anythnig with these projects (and others too).

I don't think it changes yazaddaruvala's point. What happens when ptex website goes away and disney lawyers decide there was no proof?

Poor choice of link on my part, the license is there in the Github repo:

https://github.com/wdas/ptex/blob/master/src/doc/License.txt

Luckily there are tools like the Wayback Machine from archive.org where you can retrieve the previous versions. There's also some existing cases where it's been ruled to be a legitimate source of evidence too so you're not arguing that from scratch.

If you request removal from wayback machine (either robots.txt or direct) the history is gone too.

Copy the license into your fork of the codebase.

That's not how licenses work. You can't just apply what you assume is true. You'll get called out when you don't expect it.

You should create github issues with the relevant projects.

There are some well-defined rules around publishing your code on github w/o a license. Apparently it's detailed in the TOS.

https://help.github.com/articles/open-source-licensing/#what...

If by "well-defined rules" you mean normal "Copyright Law", then yes. But it extends no protections or permissions beyond what copyright law already gives you.

> why this is an issue

The fact that this comes from Disney does not help, too.

Huge chunks of modern computer graphics production rendering infrastructure is based on open codebases.

I don't get the snark. The visualization studios (Disney, Sony, etc) work on open source is a fantastic example how open sourcing codebases can be a win-win-win situation.

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