Remember yesterday’s news about TikTok releasing a go live platform? Turns out it’s a fork of @OBSProject Shoutout to @HunterAP23 for pointing this outSTOP STEALING FROM OBS JESUS pic.twitter.com/kx8ckK3MXS— Naaackers (@Naaackers) December 16, 2021
If you do not abide by the usage terms of the open source license, yes, you are actually stealing it. Virtually all open source software licenses state that any resulting project that uses code from that open source project must also be published using the same or a derivative open source license and thus have 100% open source code, and many open source software licenses also state that you cannot make a profit from any project that uses any code from the original open source project.
Software licenses are a fuck, but under capitalism where arbitrary rules are king, they're expected to be honored. Haven't read the details here but the GPL license pretty much says "if you're using this it needs to also be GPL licenses so it stays FOSS" so that's a big one. There's some issues though, normally that more permissive licensed software won't pull in GPL stuff.
There was a lot of drama last spring around an XML file that one Ruby library used originally coming from the freedesktop dot org group (which uses GPL). Someone from freedesktop realized, lightly threatened the maintainer with a lawsuit, and the maintainer yanked all the versions that were MIT licensed (more permissive than GPL). This library was a dependency of the Rails framework, which is far and away the most popular usage of Ruby (also MIT licensed) and basically broke all fresh installs or builds of Rails projects for a day or so. The net result is that the original library got removed from the Rails project.
I've written about this a couple times on here but big-picture, anything with restrictive licenses will have a really hard time gaining traction in tech, at least right now
how DARE you
usesteal open source technologyIf you take open source, add and make it private, yes.
If it was still open source then no prob
It was available to any tiktok user
The source was not though, that's the key point
we are talking about the source code, not the program
If you do not abide by the usage terms of the open source license, yes, you are actually stealing it. Virtually all open source software licenses state that any resulting project that uses code from that open source project must also be published using the same or a derivative open source license and thus have 100% open source code, and many open source software licenses also state that you cannot make a profit from any project that uses any code from the original open source project.
Software licenses are a fuck, but under capitalism where arbitrary rules are king, they're expected to be honored. Haven't read the details here but the GPL license pretty much says "if you're using this it needs to also be GPL licenses so it stays FOSS" so that's a big one. There's some issues though, normally that more permissive licensed software won't pull in GPL stuff.
There was a lot of drama last spring around an XML file that one Ruby library used originally coming from the freedesktop dot org group (which uses GPL). Someone from freedesktop realized, lightly threatened the maintainer with a lawsuit, and the maintainer yanked all the versions that were MIT licensed (more permissive than GPL). This library was a dependency of the Rails framework, which is far and away the most popular usage of Ruby (also MIT licensed) and basically broke all fresh installs or builds of Rails projects for a day or so. The net result is that the original library got removed from the Rails project.
I've written about this a couple times on here but big-picture, anything with restrictive licenses will have a really hard time gaining traction in tech, at least right now
Edit: Heres a link to more details about the Ruby issue I mentioned above, and more discussion about license from when all that went down