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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

This is really slick, and I'm going to investigate using it for the Donald Trump animation on jungle.horse.

The license [1] doesn't look to be as encumbered as some of Facebook's other open source licenses, but does include a clause I found to be strange:

> provided Your Software does not consist solely of the Software

So if I'm reading this correctly, it means only Facebook can redistribute this software? Wat.

[1] https://github.com/facebookincubator/Keyframes/blob/master/L...

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That restriction makes this quite blatantly not open source or free software, under the accepted definitions. Why couldn't they just release this under the MIT license or something else like that?

>Why couldn't they just release this under the MIT license or something else like that?

I don't mean to be unpleasant (really!), but I don't understand what kind of answer you are expecting to get.

The only non-trivial answer one can give is also the most obvious: Facebook doesn't want to make free software.

Stated differently: why the assumption that Facebook is in the business of Free software? Or are you just expressing the desire for all companies to produce Free (in the Stallmanian sense) software? Or are you reacting to the implication that Facebook's software qualifies as free?

I only bring this up because these kinds of loaded questions have a way of devolving into flame-wars.

> Today, we’re excited to open-source and share this library more broadly, so that others can work together to build more delightful products.

Facebook's post explicitly states they view this as an open source library. So, while I agree that we cannot assume Facebook is in the business of free software, their post says they are releasing an open source library under a license that does not appear to follow OSI definition of open source.

Apparently facebook uses this restrictive license on other so-called open source projects as well (FBMemoryProfiler, etc).

Presumably if you added a unique feature it might not "consist solely of the Software". But that clause isn't the troublesome one -- "modify the Software for your own internal use" makes it crystal clear that this is absolutely not Open Source.

I wonder how that affects creating a fork of it. At what point does it become different enough that you can safely distribute it

that's true, it's a bit of a gray area.

IANAL, but it reads to me like they don't think that point exists. "You can use it, but you can't publish a fork of it." Definitely not open source in my eyes.

Are you even allowed to redistribute a modified version at all? Modification is only allowed for "internal use".

the way I read it is, I can't put a new name on it under my name and then redistribute it. But I can use it in a library or app and then open source and distribute that

I've reproduced Keyframes and am distributing here: https://github.com/jjt/Keyframes

I think you're doing this in jest and that's fine. But the only value of a fork would be one who's license is less restrictive. But the Keyframes license would prevent this, so it's fruitless.

Cool project. I first saw your domain mentioned on a post about TLDs.

Question: I assume you have some corpus of the recorded speeches of DT. How are you mapping those to words? A broader discussion about how you implemented jungle.horse would be interesting...

Thanks!

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