Ask HN: What is the license of GitHub's blog and The README project?
I don't see a license on their articles, which makes me think they are simply copyrighted.
If so, is it legal to translate an article (and link to the original article) on another website?
29 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 77.8 ms ] threadPlease don't assume things when you don't know the person.
Especially when it's this simple, "water is wet", "prefer postgresql over mongodb", "no you can't legally copy content without being authorised by the authors, even if translated".
Offering your own opinion on the law is fine, but IMHO answering someone else's question with opinion on the law is probably the wrong side of the line.
Disclaimers don't help, either, the regulation exists whether you acknowledge being outwith the licensing or not.
So the beginning of OP's question wouldn't pose a problem.
The second part (asking about the translation etc) could pose a problem, but it's phrased generally so it may or may not.
Legal advice would be applying the legal information to a very precise and specific scenario. For example, translation and republication permission is not always dependent on permission from the copyright holder if a fair use exception applies in the relevant jurisdiction, and even with permission there could be other obstacles to various forms of copyright reuse like a relevant patent from a different rights holder or a previously signed contract promising not to do this. And these details, as well as the risks of various different legal and illegal choices, may depend on the jurisdiction.
We don't really have enough information to know if exactly what OP wants to do is legal, beyond an imprecise answer of "not generally" which as mere legal information is typically fine for non-lawyers to say even where legal practice is restricted.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice - not because I am including this disclaimer but because it doesn't fit the definition of legal advice.
Some discussion here - https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/683/usa-is-i-am-not-...
There has been a history of "legal advice" being applied too broadly in practice, so a great deal of caution should still be exercised - https://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/the-overreach-of-limits...
At the end of they day it should be about products and features and not code
No. Why? are you a stupid code advocate yourself? Why wouldnt you want to write good code?
> Besides that there is still a huge difference between someone (human/ai) looking at work and getting inspired/trained on vs. reproducing the same thing.
Those models that are reproducing the same thing was my whole point. Copilot, GPT-3, stable diffusion have all been shown to do it. Copilot excessively so.
> Despite that you also think that just writing some normal code and not a real novel algorithm should be patentable?
Not me, no. Why? Do you really think that? Why would you want to do such a thing!
> I don't even want to have software patents it's so diametral to sharing and progressing together.
Patents arent copyright.
There is no inherent value of knowing how exactly writing a angular form filter or how to retrieve an entity from the backend.
90% of my code (probably more) is not inherently Peace of art. It's code I needed to write to get something done.
Ai should be able to do this and it should be great that it can do this.
Sure, I agree, but not by ignoring laws. The ends do not justify the means.
It's just ridiculous, being able to completely ignore software license terms because "you" did not read the code, "you" got the code from a statistic model from those sources with licenses. It's license laundering.
The same thing as with images.
An AI model that correctly references copyright holders and the applicable licenses would be preferential to not having the code available, IMHO.
I dont see why you would be advocating for people not to share their code in the first place. That seems couterproductive, and against the spirit of open source in general.
I'm genuinely curious, do you think Copilot writes good code?