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Comment by nerdawson | Hacker News Reader

From their license agreement:

> If you have used this plugin for FREE but monetized more than $1000, you are also required to get a license, or share us some Ad traffic as stated in win-win partnership model below.

https://github.com/floatinghotpot/cordova-admob-pro/wiki/Lic...

The project however includes the following the license: https://github.com/floatinghotpot/cordova-admob-pro/blob/mas...

Surely releasing code under an MIT license makes their statement invalid. Why would I be "required to get a license" and offered a couple of commercial options? It sounds like they need to get some legal help to properly license the project in the way they want to.

Furthermore, pricing should be clear. It's deceptive to hide it within their so-called "license" section. As a developer, why would I read the license section if it's clearly marked within GitHub as being licensed under MIT and has a LICENSE file confirming that?

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It depends on the details of the license. If it was a bog standard MIT license (which in this case it is) then you could surely fork the repo remove that logic and carry on with your day (though you'd probably still need to credit the original author with the attribution clause) - MIT like licenses can dictate some terms around uses while allowing most modifications though.

That said - you do need to actually modify the code yourself, if you instead decided to use some man-in-the-middle attack to modify the packets in flow you may still be misuing the software. There are ways you could approach a solution that would in fact violate the license, as trivial as it is to circumvent.

In my opinion, the way they present pricing is deceptive. They have a table of contents and hide pricing details under "License".

The very first paragraph reads:

>You can use the plugin for free, or you can also pay to get a license. IMPORTANT!!! Before using the plugin, please read the following content and accept the agreement. THIS WILL AVOID POTENTIAL PROBLEM AND DISPUTE.

If as a user you're paying 2% of ad revenue, the plugin isn't free.

> If you don't want to get a license as your apps may not earn too much, or you don't have a PayPal account to pay, here is a compromised option. You don't have to pay, we are also okay if just share 2 percent user traffic, so that we can cover our effort and focus on maintenance and online support.

They don't make clear that that's the default behaviour. That by doing nothing you're consenting to their 2%.

If a developer wants to profit from their work, they should behave like a business.

The monitization bit is the "license" for use of the code. The MIT license applies to the source code itself, not the execution of it.

MIT allows you to: "use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software". That's it.

Thank you. I’m realising my understanding of licenses was inaccurate and that I really ought to scrutinise projects more thoroughly.

The author of software can release his work under any number of licenses, or none at all. An author can release the same code under MIT, Apache, GPL, MPL, or commercial license at the same time.

If the code is tagged as being MIT in GitHub and includes an MIT license file, can an author reasonably argue that an end-user is receiving the code under a different license?

> If the code is tagged as being MIT in GitHub

Yes

> includes an MIT license file

Maybe. MIT license permits additional license restrictions on top of license. For example, MIT code can be copied into a proprietary system with a different license, which will forbid copying code out.

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