Re: [PATCH] clone: Warn if clone lacks LICENSE or COPYING file

From: Stefan Beller <stefanbeller@gmail.com>
Date: Mar 22, 2015, 04:20 UTC
Message-ID: <550E430F.9010308@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <1426969262.3756.1.camel@kaarsemaker.net>

On 21.03.2015 13:21, Dennis Kaarsemaker wrote:

Show 10 quoted lines

> On za, 2015-03-21 at 14:06 -0400, David A. Wheeler wrote:
>> Warn cloners if there is no LICENSE* or COPYING* file that makes
>> the license clear.  This is a useful warning, because if there is
>> no license somewhere, then local copyright laws (which forbid many uses)
>> and terms of service apply - and the cloner may not be expecting that.
> 
> Please no, especially not without an option to switch this off. Git is
> not only used in open source settings, this would be highly annoying at
> $work, where no repo has (or needs) such a file.
>

To spin this further it would be interesting to have a server advertisement during git clone which indicates if this setting is recommended to be set. Then hosting sites popular in the open source world such as github could enable this feature, and the client may enable this for the currently cloned repository (the user may have a global setting set to suppress this message though).

At $work the default of not advertising checking for such a feature would be set.