Legal Advice

232 readers

1 users here now

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

Coke

Is Reddit violating open-source software licenses? (self.legaladvice)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by poopsmith to c/legaladvice

5 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I was curious and noticed that Reddit uses a bunch of open source (MIT, BSD 3 clause, Apache 2.0, etc) licensed javascript libraries. I looked around both on the website and in the minified source and did not notice the license being retained. I am just curious if Reddit is violating the license terms by not showing these licenses.

This answer on SE implies it might be: https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/9258/how-does-javascript-minification-process-comply-with-requirements-of-opensource

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They only have to include that if they actually send you the software (depending on license, either when they send you binaries, source code, or both). Interacting with the server over the internet doesn’t count, unless they’re sending the browser JavaScript covered by such a license.

There are a few licenses that explicitly demand this sort of thing when you run the software on your own servers but let other people communicate with the software over the network, but none of the big name, long-standing licenses like MIT, BSD, Apache or GPL have that requirement.

[–] sparr 1 points 10 months ago

unless they’re sending the browser JavaScript covered by such a license.

I think the claim here is that they are.