Comment by sosodev
7 hours ago
I find it odd how we frame fairness in regards to open source software. He licensed his software as MIT. It says anyone can you use it without owing the author anything. So how is it unfair?
To be clear, I think that open source maintainers deserve much more, but I don't understand why we rarely inspect the licenses as the source of the problem.
Well there's this little pesky thing in the MIT license:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
That's what he was asking for, a mention in the credits.
He got his name in the credits. The question was if he is owed anything else. The contract he created says he was not. I’m simply suggesting he might need a different contract.
I bet if you caught a homerun ball in a baseball game, you wouldn't give it to the kid next to you because "I don't owe the kid anything".
1 reply →
But only after $$ was made.
If the comment above is correct, he was only added to the credits after he had to ask for it after the fact.
So the ONLY thing the license asked for is to be named and that was supposedly violated. So a multi million dollar company can just violate a generous license and then after a fact cling to this exact license while arguing to not pay a single cent more than the license asked for. Alright...
Only if he wants to force something different. Which it seems he does not.
Since he eventually got the credit, your unfairness argument better build entirely on the damage the creator suffered by the delay of his credit.
If I made 500M$ using an Open Source library and didn’t send at least 1M$ to the author, I would be an objectively bad person.
But you probably depend on over 500 open source libraries and tools, mostly ones you're not aware of. (Do you ever use a linux VM to run or just develop your stuff? Ever use git or curl etc? Did you know that tools and components in turn use other open-source libraries that you didn't pay for?) The main reason you use such things is so that you don't have to worry about this question.
That’s a fine perspective, but the whole point of law is to guarantee outcomes. The license could easily say “if you make more than $500M, you must pay me $1M”. Why is that not an acceptable solution here?
An interesting approach is the dual GPL and commercial license. This is used for example by the CGAL geometry library [1]. In this case, a user of the library has the choice of either paying for the library, or open sourcing the code of their software.
[1]: https://doc.cgal.org/latest/Manual/license.html
Have you ever taken part in a legal dispute? The "whole point of law is to guarantee outcomes" sounds like someone who has not.
The easiest, most "acceptable solution" is to obviously throw the oss maintainer who made your hundreds of millions possible a bone. It's not that complicated. Why you find this such an odd notion I find rather strange.
I find this whole conversation baffling. Licenses and contracts are not a replacement for being a decent person.
Sure, but contracts is the remedy society has developed to the problem that there are lots of indecent people around (not to mention that reasonable persons can disagree without being unreasonable).
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Because there’s a clear mismatch between the value generated from Box2d vs the value the creator receives, and that’s common for open-source in general.
It would be common decency to donate even a small portion of that $500 million, even if the license technically doesn’t require it.
But if this expectation really were very common, what would be the harm of putting it in a licence?
MIT is simple, open, and common which is a big benefit for indie projects, small studios, and anyone with limited legal resources.
It means there’s lots of info on the internet explaining how to use the license and they can be relatively certain they won’t accidentally fall into some legal trap or misinterpret the license. It also means there’s legal precedent around the license.
All that to say, custom licenses are actually a big issue for small players.
You seem to be confusing what is legally/contractually required with what is fair. Fairness, in general, isn't defined by law or contracts, although some laws try to codify it.
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