{"id":1527,"date":"2026-09-09T05:38:52","date_gmt":"2026-09-08T18:38:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/securelang.net\/cms\/?p=1527"},"modified":"2026-09-09T05:38:52","modified_gmt":"2026-09-08T18:38:52","slug":"open-source-licensing-can-still-look-unreasonable","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/securelang.net\/cms\/blog\/2026\/09\/09\/open-source-licensing-can-still-look-unreasonable\/","title":{"rendered":"Open Source Licensing Can Still Look Unreasonable"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">One reason people don&#8217;t do more with existing codebases like the BSD family is because of the vagueness of the terms to anyone who isn&#8217;t overly familiar with the American legal system. Basically the gist often seems like &#8220;do what you want with the code, but make sure that you credit us AND make sure that you don&#8217;t use our name to endorse your product&#8221; but their name is all over the code and has to be printed at boot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So my response to that is basically that this isn&#8217;t America, I&#8217;ll try to adhere to the license terms but if they seem contradictory then the simple fact of the matter is that USA copyright law doesn&#8217;t apply worldwide and it is fairly unreasonable from a business perspective to expect people to give much of a shit about abiding by the fine print when you&#8217;re giving something away for free.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sorta like if you give someone a free banana and it has a note on it. From a retail sales perspective that note isn&#8217;t a legal contract that the consumer has signed it&#8217;s just a product label: you already gave away the banana you can&#8217;t be that picky now about how it&#8217;s eaten.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One reason people don&#8217;t do more with existing codebases like the BSD family is because of the vagueness of the terms to anyone who isn&#8217;t overly familiar with the American legal system. Basically the gist often seems like &#8220;do what you want with the code, but make sure that you credit us AND make sure [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1527","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/securelang.net\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1527","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/securelang.net\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/securelang.net\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/securelang.net\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/securelang.net\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1527"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/securelang.net\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1527\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1528,"href":"https:\/\/securelang.net\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1527\/revisions\/1528"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/securelang.net\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/securelang.net\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/securelang.net\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}