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Is it that hard to avoid stealing someone else's stylesheet unmodified? That's exactly the same stylesheet I had on my blog until a few days ago: https://github.com/mitsuhiko/lucumr/blob/8ca68485ca230f772b0...

Makes me grumpy :-/



I give you full credit in the about page. I've made some minor tweaks, and assumed it wouldn't be a problem as you open sourced it. Was certainy not my intention to offend. Happy to change if it'd make you happy.


The stylesheets or templates are not licensed under an open source license. In fact they are completely closed source.

Don't worry too much about it though because I have since changed the design of my website. You were not the first to just copy the design. I would however prefer it a lot if you changed the design.


I agree that he should have asked first - just because something is on github does not make it open source. Seems like an oversight, no harm, no foul.

But I'm curios, why would you prefer he change it? It is a very barebones stylesheet, nice typographical choices but at the end of the day this is hardly a unique design.

And thank you for Flask and other goodies. :)


Your site appears to be open source and you haven't mentioned anywhere that it isn't okay for someone to use your code. Your repository doesn't have a license or mention if it's okay for people to re-use elements, but I (and the OP too?) would assume that if it's open source (unless otherwise stated) it's free for anyone to use whatever. He probably should have given credit, but I don't think it would be considered "stealing".


> Your site appears to be open source

There is no license anywhere which makes it closed source. The exception to this is that actual content published on the website (notice, this does not cover stuff in the github repository of the same name) is under the Creative Commons attribution-noncommercial-sharealike License which is also not an open source license.

In a separate repository there is the build tool for the website which is under an open source license (BSD).

> He probably should have given credit, but I don't think it would be considered "stealing".

It's against my licensing wishes. I generally don't like the idea of open sourcing visual styles precisely because I do not want other people to have websites that look the same. Visual styles are associated with their creators or companies behind it. For the same reason I license work under the three clause BSD license and not the MIT license.

TL;DR: source code available != open source.

//EDIT: the source code is on github because it makes it easy for people to see changes being made between revisions of articles if they want and it's an easy way for people to provide pull requests if I make a typo.


It is my understanding that, if there's no license, the author retains all rights, so that's not really a good argument (neither is "why did you put it on GitHub?").


By a reasonable reading, the linked repo is BSD licensed (see lucumr/about.rst).

If author didn't intend for some files in the repo to be BSD licensed, he should be more explicit.


What? The only thing with BSD it says is this:

> All of the open source stuff I work on is BSD licensed which means you can do with it whatever you want.

Nothing about the website is open source work. It says that if I make something open source it's BSD licensed. You can spot open source work because it comes with a license file that has an open source license in it. The website does not.


? why did you put it on github then? Are you sure you're not proud instead? :)


> why did you put it on github then?

For other people to learn, as an example of how to use rstblog, easy way to contribute fixes for typos and my horrible grammar. Also the actual texts after publishing are creative commons licensed (which however is not an open source license). It comes with strings attached.

> Are you sure you're not proud instead? :)

I am proud that people like it to the extend that they reuse it. I am proud and happy that people generally seem to like what I am doing. However I have an internal conflict with myself how much of that open source spirit applies to visual design, trademarks, logos and more.

I spend a lot of time to figure something out for the Flask project and the styles that go with Flask and extensions. There I have them under a full open source license with the added wish to the license to be a nice person and only use the style for Flask projects, however this is not binding because that would make it hard to get the project into debian.


The Artistic License 2.0 does try maintain creative control to some extent and is a free software license. Afaik, debian are ok with it.

It's possibly too much trouble to use a comparatively obscure license.




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