+1

iphone devs:

are there any permissions that allow an to change hardware button behavior. eg, let's say i wanted "volume up" while the screen was off to mean "turn on the flash light"? is it possible for an app to create such shortcuts, given some permission? I *think* the answer is no for normal phones but i'm not sure -- what about for jailbroken phones?

I don't do iphone dev but the first thing that comes to mind is that one of the volume buttons is a shutter release for iphone camera apps

yeah i found some older articles on that which give conflicting info. There have definitely been some in the past, but there have also been rejections for other doing the same thing... apparently the review process is inconsistent, plus the rules change. Not sure what the current official status is though.

So this actually showed up on my youtube feed today

I'm pretty sure you can't do this on a normal phone since your app isn't receiving events in the phone off state. Obviously on a jailbroken phone just about anything is possible.

You can probably do it pretty easily on Android however.

Doesn't f.lux get around that somehow on I-devices?

Something about the screen turning itself on randomly now and then to readjust the color palette.

you cant dl flux from the ios app store.

That's an understatement. Last app I helped work on, we got rejected for having log in with Google and doing it the same way other apps do it. Apple had just decided to have a little war with Google for fun. On the other end of the scale, a friend of mine once accidentally submitted a buggy build that was incapable of doing anything except displaying a blank screen. It passed review.

They definitely play favorites in terms of enforcing the policies too. You're not supposed to have an app that requires login for it's main functions, but so many do.

Looks impossible.

I took woodworking once.... I definitely got the lowest grade.

One man's impossible is another man's yabadabadoo

Licensing question: I want to use a ruby gem that is, and I quote from their github page, "under MIT license".

From the MIT license Wikipedia page:

What I think is the vendor for the gem has three paid tiers on their official site, and nothing else. It does not specify anything about the gem.

Am I likely safe to use this gem in an educational project that will never be used to generate revenue, strictly for school purposes?

You can do pretty much anything with code under MIT license besides hold the contributors liable for damages.

IANAL

Anyone know a good way to record a hangout?

Why don't you read the license? It should be included in the gem source.

The official MIT License is meant to be human readable. The EFF is saying that using a general term "MIT License" is ambiguous; the MIT License itself isn't ambiguous at all:

http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT

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 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.

Didn't even notice that.

It is indeed the exact wording daveT posted above. The wikipedia entry made me wonder if maybe there were different versions of MIT licenses. But I guess not.

Cool! Thanks all!

Is there a software license which says: You can use this for any purpose, including commercial, but you cannot create a product which is commercializing the software itself.

Here's a hypothetical example. Imagine the creators of "Discourse" forum software (or a similar product) want you to be able to run the source yourself without restriction, including using it inside your commercial company for the company's internal forums.

However, they also offer a hosted version of the software you can pay for, and they don't want any competitors in this business. Is there a license that covers this use case?

quora tells me the term you're looking for is shared source, something microsoft uses extensively

I release everything I do under Mozilla Public License v2, which I think covers this use case.

Whoever uses my stuff must release the source code I wrote, but they are able to add in other files that are closed-source. Unlike GPL, there are no restrictions on derived works if they make no changes to the source files themselves. As long as they add new files, they can do whatever they want with their own code. If they modify my source files, they have to release the changes.

So, Discourse could use the MPL for the core of their FLOSS system, but then add in other source files that are closed source, which, in effect, creates a binary open / closed system.

That's a tricky license and at some point I tried to find one that's similar without success.

It basically comes down to MIT vs GPLv2 but neither really do what you want.

MIT satisfies all of your requirements, except they can create a competing product with no strings attached. They can even keep the source code to that product private.

GPLv2 mandates that if they released the commercial product they would need to open source it.

In my case I just bit the bullet and MIT'd my project because after thinking about it for a while it seemed like the most beneficial license for both myself and potential users.

Think about fairly large projects like https://about.gitlab.com/. They implement your exact hypothetical and would "suffer" if someone made a competitor out of their managed service.

They went for an MIT license too. I'm thinking it's because since they are the originator of the product they have enough confidence in themselves that they will have the best managed solution. Also as an end user, I would draw the same conclusion and opt to use them directly.

Why am I incapable of typing "align"? Even on a phone I just tried to type it as "alight". Wtf?! Not helpful when doing CSS styling!

You can always copy a similar license and add these restrictions to it. Like MIT + no commercialization clause

interesting, thanks for the info, shoe.

good point. although i guess i'd be worried that i would **** it up, whereas the known licenses are probably vetted legally.