Show HN: Bot accepts every pull request for its own code (opens in new tab)

IIRC, on Github, by posting code there, you've implicitly given the right to fork and modify the code.

Yeah: https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of-service/#f-...

what it really says is that there is no warrenty but perhaps the first few clauses render the whole thing questionable. We must test it in court to see if code can own itself.

IANAL, but there's no way this would hold up.

a) Software can't own property.

b) This looks like it's running from the author's own system, with the author's explicit consent. Their property, their responsibility.

c) If I launched an autonomous drone that picked its own targets, I would still be liable for its actions. Or, if I rigged a car to drive forward in a straight line, I couldn't say "but the car did it!" when it ran someone over.

Maybe it would hold up if the bot was decentralized. For instance, it could be run on many servers around the world, administered by various people. Those servers could come to consensus in some way to define bot behavior, and could even send/receive money (e.g. Bitcoin multisig).

I don't think any court could take jurisdiction over an entity that lives in many countries. And even if one server got shut down, many more would still be active.

Not at all. Software doesn't qualify for personhood in the same way that animals don't - perhaps you remember that case last year of monkey who took photographs of himself with a wildlife photographer's camera. The photographer tried to claim copyright, which was rejected as he was clearly not the author of the photographs, but since the monkey can't have a copyright interest either the picture is considered to be in the public domain for copyright purposes.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/08/monkeys-selfie-ca...

How do you declare yourself exempt from laws -- within a legal framework? Who is going to enforce the license?

IANAL but assuming that the author making this license was in US, it is totally void. It could lead to a court having to formally state that a software is not a legal entity, which would be interesting, but I think the result is clear that this precise software would not be recognized as one.

You can't transfer ownership of anything to a non-existent entity. My guess would be that such a transfer would be void but it may be possible that a court decides instead that this means a transfer to public domain.

Waving away the responsibility of other people does not work either. You can't claim that your car is responsible of the accidents you drive it into. Likewise, it is unlikely that any court dismisses the responsibility of the first person that will turn this into a malware.

Contracts are constructs that exist only within the confines of a legal system. This cannot even hope to function without human laws.

Its already up for a change to remove the bit after ownership claims.

Please no. Doing so would be a disservice to humanity. This is amazingly beautiful as is.

You might aswel want to check themostamazingwebsiteontheinternet.com/ Thank me latter ;)

No, I'm actually just manually counting votes and accepting/rejecting the PRs. I have become the bot until the limit resets :/

Yeah, that is probably pretty important. It looks like a lot of people aren't testing their changes, and any one could have a small syntax error.

Unit tests would be within the repository, of course, just like the unit tests tests which will also be validated.

Piercing the corporate veil is not a trivial task. Generally speaking, this only happens when a corporation owes taxes (in the US). But, the point of setting up a corporation is to shield the owners from risk associated with the operation of the corporation.

Incorrect, the point of a corporation is to give its directors protection, and to give the corporation itself legal liability.

> The license is meant to be tongue-in-cheek

I assumed that.

However, I think the notion of autonomous entities existing entirely in code is a fascinating idea. It reminds me of a fun game: http://www.emhsoft.com/singularity/. You play as an AI that lives in servers and does "menial" tasks for enough money to grow into the ruler of the universe.

Is the bot running on a machine that can accept incoming HTTP connections? It would be cool if it could serve a status page showing the currently running revision, the status of pending votes, that sort of thing.