I feel like most in-house software is tacitly released under the Hot Potato Licence.
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@phrawzty I would like to imagine that this is like the licensing agreement for a Discworld cursed object. @phrawzty Now I have to re-read "The Long and Dark Teatime of the Soul".... "Hot Potato" "Pass it on"... @phrawzty This describes the migration project I've been working on since like .. February last year .. in ABSOLUTE perfection! @phrawzty "'all of earth's citizens" what about someone working from space? @phrawzty definitely got hot potatoed at work this month. I fixed a minor bug in a library that is unmaintained due to layoffs and a week later overheard my name being cited as the library owner despite barely knowing how it works or even what it does @phrawzty The closed-source version of the Hot Potato License is actually what most companies use internally. Most companies like this that I had the misfortune to work at would routinely bring up "who touched it last" as an argument for "who owns this?" The result was that most engineers simply refused to work on anything except their own pet-project sandbox repos, lest they be held responsible for maintaining the monstrosities that awaited them in the hundreds of other microservice repos. @phrawzty I laughed, but since the right to commit is remains, THE JOKE IS A LIE. Now I'll be awake all night thinking about how a license that removes rights to changes from the people who have made changes could work... |
Source: https://matt-rickard.com/bizarre-open-source-licenses