This project is not open-source; what's the license?

[kytta]

As far as I see, this project does not specify the license of its source code, nor does it include a LICENSE file. According to the copyright laws (Berne convention) and the GitHub TOS, one cannot modify this project's code without the danger/liability of being prosecuted by violating the implicit "All rights reserved" copyright.

This includes not only the source code of the website, but also the snippets published there. Technically speaking, everyone who copies those snippets could be breaking a law, since they are not explicitly open-source. One could argue that snippets of this size cannot be protected by copyright, but I believe it's better to be safe than sorry.

I propose this project adopts an open-source license. I noticed that it used to be open-source, but the license was removed in c01695b. Is there a reason why?

Making the project open-source is not as simple as one might think. Given that there is no license file AND no contributors' agreement (DCO or similar), every contribution belongs to their respective contributor. You cannot, legally speaking, relicense the whole project as MIT, because some people might be against it and would want to keep the restrictive copyright. Such contributions must either be marked as such (making the project not 100% open-source), or removed. You'll have to get individual permission from every contributor.

I can help you with the whole ordeal; I have been collaborating on the relicensing of a bigger project in the past.

P.S. I am not a lawyer.

[cedmax]

Hi @kytta,
Thanks for reaching out, while reading my answer please bear in mind that I'm not an expert, so a lot of what I'm going to say might be plain wrong 😅

I removed the old license because that PR was a complete rewrite of what was originally a fork of another snippet comparison site (with different snippets), and that license applied to that fork (and the reason I didn't introduce a new one is that frankly 8y ago I didn't care a huge amount about it).

Said that, given the purpose of the website (explicitly educational), the size of the snippets, and the statements all over the project to recommend not using the snippets as drop-ins as they are simplified solutions and to actually write tests, I doubt that any claim could hold in any court.

On top of that, the code is not distributed beyond the ability of copy/pasting, and given the simplicity of the snippets, even if someone tried to enforce anything, it would be really hard to prove the code came from this project as opposed to anywhere else on the internet or being original.

TL;DR: I don't really feel the urge of introducing a new license, but I might also not have 100% clear what would be the actual problem in not having one.

Feel free to correct me, or point me to anything I oversaw: as I said it's an area I can learn about.