[Lanedo]

This would deserve an upvote if the code was legally usable.

Since it's not too easy to spot, the paper refers to http://www.ti.uni-bielefeld.de/html/people/moeller/tsimd_war... and that page has a "Software Download" section with a custom license that has significant arbitrary restrictions:

* "agrees not to transfer [...] to other individuals"

* "agrees not to use the software [...] where property of humans [is] endangered"

* etc.

I.e. this "contribution" would only be relevant if was usable under a really free license, e.g. one of: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#SoftwareLicen...

[justin66]

The code's meant to be of use educationally and the license is meant to limit it to that purpose. There is not some kind of bait-and-switch here, the fact that the code accompanies a fifty page academic paper is a pretty big hint as to what is going on.

> I.e. this "contribution" would only be relevant if was usable under a really free license, e.g. one of: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#SoftwareLicen....

The ironic thing about your comments is that half the open source projects out there would reject the code anyhow if it was GPLed. I'm not sure why we should expect the author of such a paper to pick the magic combination of licenses (because you'd have to have multiple licenses, and that's a pain in the butt) to make everyone happy, when making everyone happy is not the purpose, writing an academic paper is.

Sometimes the value you're going to get from code comes simply from reading it or using it as a reference, and that is okay.

[jbb67]

It's still very interesting even if I can't just use the code. Not everyone wants to share their code and that's ok, but they are still sharing knowledge which is great.

[Tomte]

It is "legally usable". Just not under your pet requirements.

[rootlocus]

Don't know what you mean by "pet requirements", but this restriction:

> (3) The software and the databases will only be used for the licensee's own scientific study, scientific research, or academic teaching. Use for commercial or business purposes is not permitted. [...]

is quite limiting.

[onan_barbarian]

Absolutely agreed. As I posted elsewhere on the thread these insane custom licenses guarantee that you can't use this code for anything serious. Even if you wanted to work on a project as a hobbyist, you can't redistribute this code. So if this guy gets hit by a bus or decides that he doesn't want to release this code any more, tough.

What's more is that as this HN post conveys, there are plenty of libraries like this, many being developed under much less bizarre licenses.

The thing that I find particularly bizarre is that I have a lot of understanding for people who craft custom licenses to make money to support a project (or do dual-license stuff). But this just seems self-defeating. I honestly just stopped reading at LICENSE.

There's also a ton of frisky legal bullshit:

"(11) Should any provision of this license agreement be or become invalid, this shall not affect the validity of the remaining provisions. Any invalid provision shall be replaced by a valid provision which corresponds to the meaning and purpose of the invalid provision."

Ah yes, the old "if my clause is legal garbage, magically replace it by what I meant and enforce that".