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

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by poopsmith to c/legaladvice

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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

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (4 children)

Any commercial enterprise can use Open Source Software with a share, commercial, and editable license commercially. You'd have to look at the specific licenses, but usually open source software allows commercial use.

[–] poopsmith 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)

The MIT license allows for commercial use, but I'm wondering about this clause in the MIT license:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

Doesn't that mean the MIT license must be shown somewhere?

(the BSD and Apache 2.0 license have something similar too)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years 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 1 year ago

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

I think the claim here is that they are.

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