Comment by pastk
1 year ago
Some facts: Alexander Borsuk, Roman Tsisyk and Viktor Havaka are co-founders of Organic Maps which is a fork of Maps.Me. Alexander and Viktor were co-founders of Maps.Me as well. All of them are not working for Maps.Me anymore and Organic Maps (OM) is independent project since its inception.
Now, the current situation: OM's map server (CF worker) albeit under MIT license was de-facto closed source all this time. Roman opened the repo for public access. Alexander revoked Roman's GH permissions and closed the repo again.
(I've been actively contributing to OM for 3 years and I thought that all parts are open source. Until very recently..)
>OM's map server (CF worker) albeit under MIT license was de-facto closed source all this time. Roman opened the repo for public access. Alexander revoked Roman's GH permissions and closed the repo again.
I'm not sure if there is some distinction between software and map-data entailed in the discussion of this "server", "software repo", etc. but assuming it's all one thing:
if the content in question was MIT-licensed as specifed by the license in the repo, any one of the members of the project with access to the material would be within their rights to make copies public. There is no de-facto closed source wrt open licenses.
There is de-facto anything wrt anything. All it means is "as good as" or "might as well be" or "no different from" or "in effect" etc.
If no one is publishing a copy of something with an open license, then that is the definition of de-facto closed.
de-facto means what is the reality vs what is the theory.
In theory you can get a copy because it has a license that says so.
In reality you can not get a copy because you are not one of the people with physical access to some existing copy.
It is de-facto closed while that set of facts is true.
So am I understanding correctly that there was a private repo that had original code, and in that private repo, someone added the MIT licence? Which didn't make the code open source, because that licence hadn't actually been given to anyone*?
And then Roman made the repo public, effectively distributing the licence to people and thus making it open source, without coordinating with the other contributors?
I don't see any replies by Alexandr, but it feels like this could have easily been resolved with a less antagonistic response by Roman - but of course, I don't know what other history they have.
* I guess technically, it was given to the other contributors with access to the private repo - i.e. Roman did have the legal right to distribute it further under the MIT licence. Presumably, the original contributor (Alexandr) just applied that licence by mistake.
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This sounds like it is de-facto true but it isn't. A private file repository with a closed source license is in-facto different than a private file repository with an open source license. The license is not altered by the access permissions of the repository, and the access permissions of the file repository are not altered by the license. A compiled version of code in a private repository with a closed source license can be released publicly without that code. The same is not true if the private repository contains code with an open source license.
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the definitions of closed source and open source that you are using are not de facto correctamundo. If I download a copy of your copyright noticed and unlicensed closed source software from your server, no matter how I got access, it's still closed source and I am not entitled to even the copy I have. de facto, and ipso facto: in fact-o
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Another example of a pushover license failing the purpose a developer wants it to serve. Should have used some copyleft license, that mandates sharing of modifications. The one that comes to mind is of course AGPL, which would have avoided the whole scenario of it being closed and hidden in the first place. Maybe someone will learn a lesson now.