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Comment by metadat | Hacker News Reader

This reads like an old lady harping over nothing consequence. Did the author of TFA try to contact the Gentoo folks about this discrepancy before writing this incendiary blog post assuming negative/incompetent/ignorant intent? People are doing their level best to be respectful of other's wishes, but it's tough to account for every edge case.

Is the author of the unlicensed code upset? It doesn't seem so. Why not be part of the solution? Oh wait, being part of the solution doesn't generate attention.

Thanks for posting this, xena.

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I think we read a different article.

How I read it: The author is surprised that when packaging their program for Gentoo; they discovered (while following the licensing guidelines) that there was a dependency in their chain that had no license, which makes the result not open source.

Gentoos packaging guidelines aren't arbitrary when it comes to licensing, they're precisely right that statically linked binaries are licensed with _all_ dependencies, so any distro shipping his program is doing so illegally. Technically.

Revision: thanks for the feedback, I'm going to bed. Goodnight HN friends!

Why did you read it as inflammatory?

I read it more of a "oh shit, I just discovered this issue in code I was packaging; maybe you, reader, have the same issue in your code!"

I read it the same way as dijit. I would also add that it’s an interesting view into how licensing is supposed to be declared in modern Linux distributions and what happens when that breaks a little bit. I‘be only lightly used Linux since somewhere around 2002, mostly Raspbian, so it may not be as interesting to others?

To add, as the article says, the GH issue[0] was posted on Dec 18, 2020 by Norwin @noerw who is a member of the Gitea GitHub organization[1], so Gitea is definitely well-intentioned on clarifying the license of code it uses.

0: https://github.com/seletskiy/godiff/issues/4

1: https://github.com/orgs/go-gitea/people?query=noerw

Parent comment instantly reminded me of Paul Graham's essay "How to disagree" [1]. Parent comment seems to get up to DH2 but not much further.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

Last time I saw such disregard for software licenses, it was packaged up and branded as GitHub Copilot.

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