Licensing of snippets is unclear

[rmunn]

There have been several times when I wanted to use some code that has been posted on fssnip.net, but I can't see any license terms for the snippets. And in the absence of any posted license terms, the license terms are the default under copyright law: "All rights reserved". Which doesn't give me permission to use the code under any circumstances.

Now, I believe that the intent of the people posting these snippets was to allow them to be reused. But unless the snippet is truly trivial -- on the order of let add x y = x + y -- I have to assume that default copyright law applies, and I can't use the snippets.

I think it would be a good idea to add a section to the "Insert new snippet" form where a license can be chosen -- defaulting to the most-used license, MIT, and including several of the most popular licenses in the list. And it would be great if the "owner" of any given snippet could retroactively add a license to their snippet, so that people who (like me) are trying to be scrupulous about respecting licensing terms can finally use those useful snippets as they were intended to be used.

[Thorium]

I think in EU this is not a problem but in US might be.
Some of them compared here
The fsprojects/ProjectScaffold is referring this by default: http://unlicense.org/

[rmunn]

I'm pretty sure EU copyright law follows the Berne Convention, which means that any copyrightable work (including code) is automatically subject to copyright law, without the author needing to register it or, in fact, do anything at all. So this would still be a problem in the EU as far as I can tell, though I am not a lawyer so my opinion counts for nothing in a court of law.

Any comment on this from @tpetricek? There are lots of useful snippets on the site, and I cannot use them in my open-source projects because of legal issues, even though I'm sure the author intended for me to be able to use them in an open-source project. Which means that unfortunately, right now your wonderful site is useless to me. :-(

A prominent "everything you add will be MIT-licensed unless you say otherwise" feature would go a long way towards making the fssnip website actually useful, the way you intended it to be. (Though it would not be able to be retroactively applied).

[Thorium]

There is no software patents in EU (besides patenting business-methods) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_under_the_European_Patent_Convention
So in that sense you shouldn't be able to own a little piece of source code.

But I do agree that some clarifications should be added to the site. Currently it says only: "The purpose of public snippets is to create a repository of useful snippets that people can easily find, view and use in their code."

[tpetricek]

I think the retro-active application is making this tricky. If someone can add a feature that marks existing snippets as unlicensed and all new snippets as MIT licensed, that would be great (I think the old ones need to be marked; insert page needs a new bit of text and page that shows the snippet needs to say MIT or no license). Then we can also contact authors of past snippets and manually mark many of them as MIT. From: Robin Munn [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 25 July 2017 04:34 To: fssnippets/fssnip-website <[email protected]> Cc: Tomas Petricek <[email protected]>; Mention <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [fssnippets/fssnip-website] Licensing of snippets is unclear (#80) I'm pretty sure EU copyright law follows the Berne Convention, which means that any copyrightable work (including code) is automatically subject to copyright law, without the author needing to register it or, in fact, do anything at all. So this would still be a problem in the EU as far as I can tell, though I am not a lawyer so my opinion counts for nothing in a court of law. Any comment on this from @tpetricek<https://github.com/tpetricek>? There are lots of useful snippets on the site, and I cannot use them in my open-source projects because of legal issues, even though I'm sure the author intended for me to be able to use them in an open-source project. Which means that unfortunately, right now your wonderful site is useless to me. :-( A prominent "everything you add will be MIT-licensed unless you say otherwise" feature would go a long way towards making the fssnip website actually useful, the way you intended it to be. (Though it would not be able to be retroactively applied). — You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub<#80 (comment)>, or mute the thread<https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAdoJc4fuJmg2wFlgSwWvw_VANm3japlks5sRWIOgaJpZM4KXHrB>.

[Thorium]

If people have sent them to @tpetricek, is he the owner now?

Just declare that all are now MIT if sender will not contact you in one month. ;-)

[rmunn]

@Thorium - EU law doesn't recognize software patents, but it certainly does recognize software copyright. Copyright ≠ patents. Also, no, @tpetricek is not the owner of any snippets sent to him: their copyright is held by the original authors unless those authors explicitly assign the copyright to someone else. And if Tomas were to follow your advice to declare that all those snippets are MIT-licensed unless someone contacts him, he would open himself up to LOTS of potential lawsuits. I don't mean this to sound mean, but you are badly misinformed about copyright law, both in the US and in the EU; I strongly recommend reading http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/osfreesoft/book/ (which is, itself, licensed under an open license so you can read it for free) before you give more advice on a subject that you currently misunderstand. Again, please don't take this as an insult. There's no shame in being ignorant and needing to learn something. But since this is an area where you can get yourself in serious trouble through ignorance, I would seriously advise you to read that book as soon as possible so you have a better grasp of what is and is not covered by copyright.

@tpetricek - We can't retroactively apply a license, I agree. But having some way of saying "@rmunn has agreed to license all his current contributions as MIT", and then having the site automatically update all my existing snippets to the MIT license, would probably save you a lot of time. I don't have that much time to work on F# these days, but I'll add that concept to the ever-growing list of F# ideas that I'd like to tackle when I can find a moment. And if someone else gets to it before I do, great!

[Thorium]

Thanks, I will.

Edit: contacting manually / via twitter / ... asking for MIT licence, those of the authors that already are in Tomas' contacts would probably cover over 500 of the snippets total.