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Comment by xwowsersx | Hacker News Reader

How does GitHub encourage sloppy licensing? How is GitHub bad for free software?

I think the reason is that GitHub lowers the barrier of entry to distribution of OSS.

This makes more people distribute OSS, and most devs do probably not care as much about OSS licensing as RMS would like and therefore do "mistakes".

RMS has a high horse stance, I think that easier access to OSS is better even though it might come with some side effects.

It's way easier for him to have a high horse about doing FOSS "correctly" when he was in an academic environment with different pressures for most of his career. There'd be a different tune sung if he were an average Joe with business requirements to fulfill.

You do realize that he is not an average Joe with business requirements to fulfill because he decided to mount that high horse, right ?

This argument of 'Oh, he'd be singing a different tune if he had to deal with today's reality' is so naive.

The fact that he doesn't (/doesn't have to) deal with everyday reality is his whole point -- he has claimed that it is unrealistic to use software that confirms to his set of values, so he denied to participate in that reality.

I think the reasoning is that you can host projects on GitHub without them being FLOSS, since you can just start a repository and add code without ever adding a license. If you do not add a license, it is just copyrighted code, and cannot be redistributed freely.

Some repositories take this to the extreme. There are some closed source software vendors that use GitHub as an issue tracker and collection of Markdown files.

If GitHub wants to permit such uses - it's their party.

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