

Show HN: “Add a License Please” – GitHub Bot - karangoeluw
https://github.com/karan/add-a-license-please

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jsnathan
I think it's not a bad idea to remind people to add a license to their public
github projects. It's probably an oversight when they publish code for others
to reuse, but don't add a license.

I've had to email people before to ask what the license is.

But what exactly is the point of publishing this bot? Do you want multiple
people to start running it? Will the bot create multiple automated issues per
repo? That sounds like overkill.

Maybe add a note about that.

~~~
karangoeluw
> Do you want multiple people to start running it?

No. That's why the looping part of the bot isn't published.

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sjs382
> Github is full of "open source" project that carry no explicit license.

Some of that is intentional, some is not.

You may think that everything should include a license, but not everyone
shares your sensibilities/values. There are plenty of valid reasons to not
include a license, including "I don't want to think about it right now" and "I
just don't want to assign a license".

Please don't spam everyone who doesn't agree with you. I hope Github bans this
bot.

~~~
mailslut
I agree with sjs382 - I don't think it's your place to be spamming repos
telling them to add a licence.

~~~
karangoeluw
Ok. Who's is it then?

~~~
sjs382
Nobody's.

Feel free to ask individual repos that you may want to use code from, but
unsolicited, automated messaging like this is spam.

~~~
camhenlin
Yeah totally. Pretty much every time I have a code idea, I create a new github
repo. If someone went through and did pull requests on every single one of
those to add a license, it would probably do nothing but piss me off and
convince me to spend time figuring out how to report the account. That being
said if an actual individual developer sent me a pull
request/email/tweet/whatever asking for a license, I can promise you I'd be
sitting there on my phone scrambling to get a license on there.

If GitHub wanted all the repos on GitHub to have licenses, they would require
it, or create a policy where all repos with no licenses automatically meet a
minimum licensing requirement.

~~~
karangoeluw
> did pull requests

Except this bot doesn't create PR's.

