I think the confusion is also because it's a comparison of Community Self-Hosted (CE) vs the pure Open Source CLI - the latter is what works without license key
I'll see if I can help with clarifying this in the table!
Website: https://www.jvt.me (used for blog, but I also use as an IndieWeb site, so I i.e. reply to social media posts from my website, and they're syndicated out to the different platforms)
I've spent a bit of time thinking about this[0] - as a maintainer (oapi-codegen, Renovate, previously Jenkins Job DSL Plugin and Wiremock), as someone who used to work on "how can we better fund our company's dependencies", and building projects and products to better understand dependency usage
As others have noted, there are a few areas to watch out for, and:
- some ecosystems have more dependencies over fewer, and so we need to consider how to apply a careful weighting in line with that
- how do we handle forks? Does a % of the money go to the original maintainers who did 80% of the work?
- how can companies be clever to not need to pay this?
- some maintainers don't want financial support, and that's OK
- some project creators / maintainers don't get into the work for the money (... because there is often very little)
- there's a risk of funding requirements leading to "I'm not merging your PR without you paying me" which is /not problematic/ but may not be how some people (in particular companies) would like to operate
MIT and CC-BY-4.0 are the industry standards for code snippets and documentation, respectively.
If the author intends for the work to be copyleft, non-commercial, or a combination of those, there are specific licenses within the Creative Commons family that satisfy those requirements. These are already widely used for open-source books on GitHub.
This is why I suggested "any Creative Commons licenses" rather than a specific one. My goal wasn't to spark an argument over which one is the "best", but rather to provide the author with options to choose from, depending on their specific needs.
>My goal wasn't to spark an argument over which one is the "best", but rather to provide the author with options to choose from, depending on their specific needs.
GitHub has Issues and Pull Request features for exactly this purpose.
Are you proposing that people who want to use this code should just assume they can do so, violate the implied copyright, and accept the associated risk?
You're talking about a library of markdown files for your own personal use to practice writing some code, posted to github, and includes a bunch of language about how to contribute, explicit instructions to fork it, etc.
Imagine giving a flying shit about the lack of a license, in that context. Couldn't be me.
The lack of a license file is by several orders of magnitude the least interesting thing about this repo.
So it's the nature of the repo for you, then. Presumably you wouldn't take the same position if the repo contained a substantial software system.
> Imagine giving a flying shit about the lack of a license, in that context. Couldn't be me.
Some of us are accountable to other people for these kinds of things. One comment mentioned possibly using this for a team transitioning to Go. In that context, license can matter. Having explicit authorization to use it changes it from an open question that can raise concerns, to something you don't have to worry about.
Btw well done on adding to the "perennial complaining about the license". The top comment made a perfectly reasonable request, that may have been useful to the OP author. It wasn't a complaint. You could have just not commented. And flagging was an obnoxious choice.
I moved from oh-my-zsh to grml ~10 years ago, and I've enjoyed it - it's got good defaults, is extensible (I've added custom stuff to handle how I manage directories for work things) and the single-file nature of the defaults makes it super straightforward to put it onto a new machine (ie a server) without then necessarily needing to do any extra tweaking
Before I joined Mend to work on Renovate, I wrote https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40011111 which goes into some ways I found Renovate better than Dependabot, and it still very much holds true (although I'm a little more biased now!)
Re costs / why giving things away for free - @rarkins (Rhys Arkins, who created Renovate) has worked very hard over the years to give as much good stuff away to the community, and make it more straightforward for folks to run Renovate
The core (Mend Renovate CLI (AGPL-3.0-only)) is free to use and run as you want, and many folks do - it's very flexible and scales well as-is
But if you want things like real-time webhook processing of "rebase this PR" (and/or a few other features) then Mend Renovate Self-Hosted Community (commercial-but-free) Edition is a nice packaging and layer on top of the CLI for that
Running the CLI itself on a schedule against your repos is also absolutely viable as a solution, and we have many users who do that and are super happy with it
I've been doing this for years with my site, and it's brought me a lot of joy that I can go back and search my site for various posts I've made over the last decade across all the platforms I use - I have a more high friction setup, but that's because of my own terrible choices
(a blog post I wrote, prior to joining Mend and working as a Renovate maintainer)
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