"Copyright (C) 2013-2015 NaturalMotion Limited. Used under licence.

Code written by Justin Webb.

Licence granted by Justin Webb with the permission of NaturalMotion Limited.

No rights are granted by NaturalMotion Limited under this licence. "

Uh, so Justin is using it under license from natural motion, and justin has been granted the right to license it, but natural motion is explicitly not granting any rights under those licenses?

That is somewhat nonsensical. Either naturalmotion is granting rights through justin, or they aren't.

If they aren't, it's not clear anyone has the right to use the code. If they are, the "no rights are granted by natural motion" part is wrong.

I'm not a lawyer or particularly strong with English, but at least it makes sense in this interpretation.

Except it's used under license from naturalmotion, and naturalmotion owns the code (hence the copyright naturalmotion).

Yet, naturalmotion explicitly grants no rights.

I can state affirmatively this makes no sense :)

As I said, either they've granted rights (through justin), in which case that statement that they grant no rights should not be there (because they are in fact, granting rights) Or they haven't granted rights (through justin), in which case it's not open source and who knows what rights you are getting here.

However, the language defining step (b) ("granted by Justin Webb with the permission of NaturalMotion Limited") is hand-wavy and doesn't spell out exactly what rights are granted, so I would agree that this seems legally pretty shaky. What rights is NaturalMotion intending to reserve by including the following sentence? If there are any, do they conflict with the ability to redistribute under a BSD license? If there are none, why is that sentence there ar all?

There is a difference between Open Source and Free Software, but it's ideological, not technical (as pertaining to the rights granted to the users of the software).

This is what shared source is about. Open source is nearly always used as defined by the OSI:

> https://opensource.org/osd

For an official example of the use of the term "open source" to mean "you can read the source but are not allowed to do anything else with it" see the 2007 announcements about QNX. OSI explicitly declared there is no (OSI) open sourcing in what QNX did at the time. https://opensource.org/node/195

For an example of people using the term to mean only "you can read the source" look no further than the discussions related to the recent leaking of Amiga 3.1 source code where people were debating if an effort can be made to convince the copyright owners to "open source" the code: "Correct me if i'm wrong, but open source doesn't have to equal FOSS. I'd be inclined to agree with you if it were FOSS, but just being open source could provide 'assistance' to Cloanto who can incorporate peoples ideas/fixes but still retain the right to sell it when others don't. Managed well, could it actually be beneficial to Cloanto and the broader Amiga community?" "You are correct. FOSS and Open Source are not the same. Permissive licensing doesn't have to be attached to the opened source." "This is true, but nobody suggested it should be FOSS, me included. Open sourcing of any kind just isn't going to happen without some sort of miracle."

Unfortunately the term "free software" is a terribly ambiguous one (and Richard Stallman and the FSF are to blame here since they knew about the homonimity of the word "free" beforehand) And even more unfortunately "open source" has for a long time become ambiguous. You can not rely on "open source" meaning "OSI open source" to everyone you talk to. And members of both organisations and their supporters spend a lot of time fighting about the meaning of each others terms. So we are stuck with the horrible term "FLOSS", an abbreviation of "Free & Libre & Open Source Software" to roughly define what we actually want to talk about: both copyleft ( https://www.gnu.org/copyleft/ ) and copyfree/permissive ( http://copyfree.org/standard ) licensed software (and in some cases also public domain).

You can complain about ambiguous words and RMS having chosen "free" all you want, but these are the terms we have, and we shouldn't give them up too easily.

It seems like this is a project written by one guy to make his job easier, in light of Microsoft's own Android/VS project he made the decision to release this project to open source expecting a decrease in interest over time (Android++ appears to have some benefits over the official project for now, but realistically speaking just having the full support of Microsoft behind it versus the effort of one guy means Android++ loses over time). His employer got involved because legally they own the copyright since he wrote it while being employed by them and in service of his job there, and they okayed the open source release but ultimately didn't want to get involved in any way that they might be seen to have any liability, thus the kind of nonsensical license.

(All of that is totally speculation on my part, fwiw).

But given all the above and the fact that you don't need to distribute Android++ code as part of products you make with it, I can't imagine anyone practically claiming any copyright violations as a result of any of this even if the license is legal mumbo-jumbo.

I wouldn't be particularly worried about using Android++, worse case scenario you get a cease and desist on using it, but since it is a development tool you can pretty easily just switch to Microsoft's project at that point (copyright issues with the development tool shouldn't taint the end product you create with it in this case) and practically speaking nobody is going to issue that C&D.

My bigger worry than the copyright concerns (if I had any vested interest in the project) would be the Android++ name due to the obvious trademark violation, which is harder for everyone involved to just ignore if they are made aware of it.

At any rate, misunderstanding of software licenses wrt open source is a pet peeve of mine as well, so I think pointing out this issue is totally valid, but practically speaking I wouldn't worry about it in this particular case if I used this software.

As mentioned, naturalmotion could actually probably sue every downloader/user for copyright infringement. Would they? Who knows.

Now practically, most of the time you are right. The problem is what is practical now doesn't always stay that way. Companies get acquired, change owners, people's monetary situation changes, etc. More often than not shit gets weird before rights get extinguished.

So my experience is that 90-95% of the time, you are right, nobody cares, it all goes according to plan.

The other 5-10% of the time, it requires lawyers and a lot of money to unf*ck it.

Hacker news rarely hears about these cases, sadly.

So sure, if you want to play the odds, go for it. But I find engineers are very Laissez-faire about this kind of thing right up until it comes down on them like a ton of bricks.

Although NaturalMotion Limited says they grant no rights under this license, you are allowed to fork this repository, as they have implicitly granted those rights to you by agreeing to the GitHub terms of service.

[1] https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of-service/

§ F. Copyright and Content Ownership

"We claim no intellectual property rights over the material you provide to the Service. Your profile and materials uploaded remain yours. However, by setting your pages to be viewed publicly, you agree to allow others to view your Content. By setting your repositories to be viewed publicly, you agree to allow others to view and fork your repositories."

"By uploading their code to a public GitHub repository, they agree to GitHub's terms of service[1], which grants other users additional rights to this code. "

This has literally never been upheld in court, nor is it likely to be upheld in a way that people want (see the above parts about what rights it really covers), to be frank :)

Additionally, it would be inapplicable in this case.

You can't give away rights you don't have. Note that NaturalMotion didn't upload this, Justin did.

If you upload some Google owned source code, you haven't suddenly granted rights on behalf of Google, you've just likely committed copyright infringement.

Someone relying on the github license grant (ie a viewer or downloader) would still be a copyright infringer, and in turn try to use the "innocent infringement" defense (17 USC 504(c)(2)). They would fall neatly into the category of people who believed they had a license to use it. The problem, of course,is that this defense is eliminated completely by the presence of the notice. See 17 USC 401(d).

So the people who downloaded and used it would be screwed as well, despite whatever github has written here :)

(I have no evidence or position on whether the result would be different if naturalmotion knew or acquiesced explicitly to the uploading to github. But then you'd still hit the same viewing and forking rights are not the same as downloading and using rights, and it's highly unlikely you would convince a court they are the same).

If Justin works for NaturalMotion, then we can argue that he has "apparent authority", even if he wouldn't otherwise have authority.

I'm thinking that they are talking about forking within the GitHub infrastructure, which means having the same code in multiple locations within GitHub (as a copy). The licensing doesn't change when the code is forked.

Edit: Someone mentioned that Justin uploaded this repository, and not NaturalMotion. If Justin doesn't already have the right to distribute this on GitHub, then the rights granted to you by the ToS probably don't apply.

https://xamarin.com/starter