I would like to have my blog indexed on GNOME Planet. GNOME Planet’s repo, however, doesn’t appear to be licensed – there’s no note about the license on https://gitlab.gnome.org/Infrastructure/planet-web, and no license file in the repo.
It would be difficult to add a license now, as there have been thousands of commits to the repo, with a lot of individual contributors. Relicensing might require contacting each one of these authors.
But I don’t like committing to repositories which are not licensed. I’m not even sure I can – do I maintain my copyright, or does the new owner? How would that fall out in court? In which jurisdiction is gnome-planet – the US?
So I asked ChatGPT (itself a pretty odd legal move) whether I could license a commit. Unsurprisingly, it says that no, you can’t, because a repository is a work in itself, and that license would take over. This is obviously garbage. When I asked it to clarify, it said that you might be able to, but it would “violate norms”. Sure, that seems accurate, but I am glad that ChatGPT is not my lawyer.
I figure, if my work is my work, there’s no reason I can’t license a change to a file. Whether not that license will be enforced is anyone’s guess, but legally, I should be responsible for my own lines of code. So, I opened this pull-request: https://gitlab.gnome.org/Infrastructure/planet-web/-/merge_requests/163. I noted in the commit that the license is an MIT license, and then I noted that in the PR comment field, too.
Technically, the MIT license demands that the license be shared with the commit. So I’ve just amended the commit to include the license, too, which satisfies my needs.
I don’t think that there will ever be a technical issue with licensing for this repo. And I don’t know if Felipe will merge my commit. But it is an interesting experiment.
➜ planet-web git:(feat/add-my-feed) git show HEAD commit 3acaff792c635e9c277d892f37b45997b0b57d70 (HEAD -> feat/add-my-feed, richardlitt/feat/add-my-feed) Author: Richard Littauer <richard+github@burntfen.com> Date: Tue May 6 09:38:38 2025 +1200 Adding my ID This commit is licensed under an MIT license. MIT License Copyright (c) 2025 Richard Littauer Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: The above copyright notice and this permission notice (including the next paragraph) shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE. diff --git a/config/gnome/config.ini b/config/gnome/config.ini index 9ea71857..4829be43 100644 --- a/config/gnome/config.ini +++ b/config/gnome/config.ini @@ -3513,3 +3513,7 @@ outreachy = 1 [https://conduct.gnome.org/feed/] name = Code of Conduct Committee #nick = + +[https://blogs.gnome.org/richardlitt/feed/] +name = Richard Littauer's blog +nick = richardlitt
Leave a Reply