Is it safe to use a library comes with no license?

[ddabrahim]

Hi all!

As I am building my project, I decided to use 3rd party libraries as much as I can, because I don't enjoy recreating the wheel all the time. On GitHub there is a library for pretty much everything I need, however some of them comes with no license, but it was shared to be used by others according to readme but the creator decided not to include a specific license to explicitly give permission.

I was wondering if is it safe to use such libraries at all? Obviously I would give credit and I have no intention to use it to make money, so I think in that regard it is safe, but if I was making money with something based on a library comes with no license wondering if is it safe, can I get in to any legal trouble later?

Thank you.

[pgimeno]

In most jurisdictions, by default you have no permissions, so I wouldn't call it safe (legally speaking).

The GPL relies on that default: if you violate the GPL then you don't have any explicit permissions to use/distribute/change/etc. the program, and since copyright laws indicate that you don't have any implicit permissions either, you're violating the copyright of the work. That's why it's so important that GPL code has a valid copyright statement.

[ddabrahim]

Thank you for confirming my suspicion. Wish GitHub would force people to choose a license when they create a repo. I am certain people often share their code on GitHub to allow others to use it but simply don't care to choose a license.