hey folks who are dumping feedly due to their spying on workers etc:

what do you want in a feed reader? open-ended question, no polls. what's your ideal feed reader look like?

Pls boost for reach. Thanks!

9/

i have a lot of friends who i admire deeply that are huge OSS fans. i use OSS every day, literally. i have no aversion to the practice + believe it has been a boon to society.

that said, not everyone on the planet plays by the same rules. what you intended to allow and what the license actually allows may be significantly different.

layer in public access to your code and deviance from the license, either in spirit or actual terms, is just a matter of time.

here we are

8/

license terms are key here to what is legally permissible. but because humans are not great rules-followers, what really controls this flood-gate is what's accessible.

i've written before abt the importance of licensing + public release to the protection of your IP: https://jbminn.com/posts/oss-will-kill-your-startup/

"Public release is a forever decision."

make sure you understand what that means several yrs down the road.

7/

now that license would allow for the AI "code-generation" nonsense (fancy autocomplete / search) if it had been applied to any publicly released software.

here's where things are both super black + white and fuzzy as hell:

my license doesn't give you permission to re-release my software. but where exactly are the bounds of a derivative work? is that the AI scraper? whatever the scraper spits out?

suddenly it's less clear.

6/

my license

License: The Minnihan License
copyright [year] John Minnihan

1. This script, associated functions and code ("the code") may be used by you ("the recipient") for any purpose.
2. This code may be modified in any way deemed useful by the recipient.
3. This code may be used in derivative works of any kind, anywhere, by the recipient.
4. Your use of the code indicates your acceptance of these terms.
5. This notice must be kept intact with any use of the code to provide attribution.

5/

i decided it wasn't worth the cost or relationship damage (vc friends were backing this co) to litigate that one, so i let it go. this was my first direct encounter w/ 'people are gonna use it if it's there' behavior.

the best you can do is to create a written legal agreement between yourself + the recipient. you can't later enforce an agreement that doesn't exist. don't even get me started on oral agreements.

4/

the license i first created in ca. 2001 had seven terms which i later condensed to five. it covered my intentions abt what could be done w/ the licensed work and ensured that any use of it anywhere would contain attribution.

i used this license on everything i released (in whatever manner) since. i was dismayed a couple times to find that it was ignored - the most glaring ex. was use of my logfile-tailing technique in a commercial log manager.

3/

i learned quickly to not accept any new gigs that attempted to assert ownership over the automation i'd already produced + importantly - critically - the client wld not own anything i produced on that project.

licensed in perpetuity, sure. own? absolutely not.

in the early to mid-aughts, the contract pages listing my pre-existing works that were exempt from whatever claims the client may later make were full + very specific. i had numerous clients ask if i was an attorney. (i'm not)

2/

if you want derivative works handled in [x] manner, state so in your license.

as part of my early infra work, i created build + release systems at multiple large orgs. this necessarily included original work. after i'd done a few of these, i had a repeatable process - an approach that consisted of implementing the same[-ish] systems at each new client.

i created a license for these works that expressed my intentions, asserted copyright but also allowed for local modifications + reuse.

1/ a thread on AI code generators

the longer i'm around, the less inclined i am to profess expertise on anything. but i do have lots of experience w/ source code hosting, licenses that apply to it + associated issues. so i'm expert-y i guess.

scraping code from a public repo + using it to generate derivative works may be permissible if the original work was licensed to explicitly allow such use. the orig author(s) may be unhappy, but that's how licenses work (generally).

i was laid-off twice early in my career in very large reorgs / cost-cutting.

the thing that wld have been helpful for me to hear then was 'this is not abt you. you were a number on someone's spreadsheet. they wanted that number to go down by 1000 or 2000 or 10,000'.

so, to anyone who needs to hear that today:

it's not abt you. you did nothing wrong.

something i wrote a while back that's been viewed 75k times is pretty relevant today:

'Company culture isn't magic pixie dust that gets sprinkled on your startup when you get funded. It's your *character* amplified thru the org'