[Labs-l] Questions regarding the Labs Terms of use

Fri Mar 13 17:36:00 UTC 2015

(anonymous) wrote:

> [...]

> To be clear: I'm not going to make my code proprietary in
> any way. I just wanted to know whether I'm entitled to ask
> for the source of every Labs bot ;-)

Everyone is entitled to /ask/, but I don't think you have a
right to /receive/ the source :-).

AFAIK, there are two main reasons for the clause:

a) WMF doesn't want to have to deal with individual licences
   that may or may not have the potential for litigation
   ("The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil").  With
   requiring OSI-approved, tried and true licences, the risk
   is negligible.

b) Bots and tools running on an infrastructure financed by
   donors, like contributions to Wikipedia & Co., shouldn't
   be usable for blackmail.  Noone should be in a legal po-
   sition to demand something "or else ..."  The perpetuity
   of OS licences guarantees that everyone can be truly
   thankful to developers without having to fear that other-
   wise they shut down devices, delete content, etc.

But the nice thing about collaboratively developed open
source software is that it usually is of a better quality,
so clandestine code is often not that interesting.

Tim