16
rocktim
4y

This is something I think about a lot. Value of Licenses in open source! As long as it is open source people don't seem to care much about the license attached to it.
There is this portfolio a girl desiged and created herself and made it open source. And she clearly states that she spent hours of time designing it so if you use this then do make sure give credit in the footer saying she designed it. Then I see a lot of people using her repo as their own with zero credit to her. That's just awful.

Comments
  • 5
    Hoping it's more than what's in the image, because that's mostly the puppeteer getting started examples.
  • 1
    @SortOfTested yes. he added more ss in his actual tweet
  • 6
    The value is being able to sue people into oblivion, if they're too cheap to give you credit.
  • 5
    @metamourge
    This. Crying about it on reddit shows they know fuck all about protecting their neck.
  • 0
    @metamourge I see. I don't know much about what can be done in these situations. I have an experience like this too. A guy literally copies my entire repo but changes the name. I didn't like it and thought about confronting him about it but since i had a mit license i didn't say anything. still once you put too much work on a project and someone else claims it just by changing the name without giving any credit.it feels kinda bad
  • 4
    Hey, I came across this yesterday. AWS wasn't exactly morally right with what it did but the license of the repo didn't need to to explicitly give credits to the original author. Though it would've been awesome if they still did it without any legal obligation.

    But on AWS part, they had given the attribution in the chrome extension bundle which the original author was not aware of at the time but acknowledged it when the person was informed.

    Representative from AWS quickly sprung into action and the attribution is given on the site as well
  • 1
    @unicorndev if its your code you still have the up rights to it. Just tell him to give credit as per the MIT license or get bent. Contact github or whichever site and tell them its a copyright breach
  • 1
    This is why you GNU GPL your code 😏
  • 0
    I wouldn't give credit either, License doesn't require that. GitHub licenses are not real legal licenses. I'd rather pay her a few bucks than give her unnecessary credit. If it's not supposed to be open-source and people keep it open-source they should not be surprised if that happens.
  • 2
    @theabbie What is unnecessary about giving someone credit ? Just curious. Obvioiusly since its open source then copying code is normal. But we are talking about claiming another repo as their own when the author clearly states to give credit. Obviously you can ignore that but it's just showing respect to their work I guess. I can't claim someone else's repo as my own work just by changing the name. It does not feel right to me.
  • 1
    @matt-jd I see. thanks for the info. I will keep that in mind from now on.
  • 0
    @unicorndev I am talking about that Girls portfolio website, first of all, websites are always open source, it's pretty common to copy stuff or copying the whole website. She might have requested credit, but why would anyone do that? Regarding AWS it's weird why would they need anyone's code, it's something debatable. That girl should give patreon or something. Credit is not something anyone would prefer to give.
  • 1
    @saiprasad Yes, They also tweeted by apologizing for forgetting to give credit to him, I think. Thats good :)
  • 1
    @theabbie Ah I see. But still, I see many developers give credit to many other projects even just for simple algorithms they took from the person's repo. At last, it boils down to your personal choice. I would definitely give credit if the author asks for it. About the girl repo , It's not a boilerplate, Its literally her own portfolio so I can see why she would ask for credit. Then again it's upto people if they want to give credit or not.
  • 0
    @unicorndev That's upto Developer, people don't give credit to code taken from Stackoverflow, If someone asks for credit then it should be given, I agree. Maybe people didn't know she wanted credit. Can you show us the Repo, I would love to see.
  • 1
    @theabbie
    Looks like this one:
    https://github.com/checkly/...

    And i too don't know, why people posting on a "social" site for IT people don't link their sources. I mean, it isn't like this is one of the big news sites where they have that constant fear of people leaving their site by following a link...
  • 0
    @Oktokolo I was more interested in that girls Portfolio Repository, But, even with this, it's open-source, what did he expect then? People are free to use it without giving any Credit.
  • 3
    @theabbie
    Sadly, @unicorndev avoided literal quoting in his post, and the concept as such is too generic, so i don't know how to search for that random girl's repo containing an often copied website template...

    And yes, if you want to prevent big corp taking the code and using their market power to make it closed-source by fork-and-upgrade, you have to use a viral license.
    The GPLv3, while being a huge improvement over the GPLv2, sadly still does not prevent against big cloud using the improved software on their own cloud servers only without giving upgrades back to the community though.
    But the GNU AGPLv3 does and therefore is probably the right license to use for cloudable/SaaS-able software.
  • 0
    @Oktokolo or people should just not care, If the company likes someone's code so much, they might hire them.
  • 4
    @theabbie
    In a competitive world, people do care about "freeloaders" especially, if the owners of such "freeloaders" have multiple orders of magnitude more wealth than they have.
    Viral licenses exist to make sure that at least the software improvements are finding its way back to the original project and that the "freeloaders" aren't additionally actively harm the original project.
    It is sad that a license is needed to enforce such absurdly basic things - but there is no honesty in big corp...

    But if you don't care, then just use CC0, wich puts your work as close to the public domain as legally possible.
  • 1
    @Oktokolo here is her repo.

    https://github.com/bchiang7/v4

    Where she clearly states she didn't open source it as a template/boilerplate. Since people were asking for it she made it open source that's why she asks for credit when used.

    @theabbie so I guess you are the kind of person you would not care about giving credit even if it asked. So assume if you copy-paste someone's entire repo and call it yourself and of course you are smart enough to remove the license. And after a few days you get an email from the author of the project saying to give proper credit or they might take legal action. What would you do? You stated that you rather give them a few bucks instead of credit. What if they want only credit. You just would not give a fuck and ignore them until they take legal action just cause you don't like to give credit to the rightful owner. Also installing a module and coping from stack overflow is a way different thing.
  • 0
    @unicorndev If credit is not asked, then no way I am giving that, If asked, I may find other alternatives and not use that Project, or if necessary, decide if it's necessary to give credit depending on the amount of material used. The license does not mention any need to give credit, so it's a purely ethical issue. Claiming a repo is a different thing, and in girl's case, using her design is completely legal. I won't use any project demanding credit. So, ultimately, If used as per License, giving credit is a choice of Developer, If someone really wants that much control over Project, they should go for actual legal licenses and not rely on GitHub licenses.
  • 0
    @unicorndev Yeah, her website is really good, it's understandable why people used it.
  • 1
    @theabbie You completely misunderstood everything I think. We were not even talking about giving credit for projects that don't ask for it. I dont know why you mentioned it. Anyway you seem to have a very conservative and different mind set to the whole open source and appreiating people's work scene. So I will leave this thread here 👍
  • 0
    @unicorndev Yeah, my opinions might be different, In conclusion, Someone asks for credit, you give it, great, you don't give it, no problem, you're not obliged to. You claim someone else's repo, you break TOS, you face consequences. It's as simple as that.
  • 0
    @unicorndev
    Thanks for the repo link.

    As she clearly states that attribution is required, i assume that effectively becoming part of the license regardless, wich license she selected.
    The MIT license alone would only have required keeping the copyright notice and attribution in copied source code instead of in the GUI visible to the end users. So it is a good thing, she clearly states the additional requirement right in the README.md.
  • 1
    I don't know... Don't open source it then?

    Now he can glorify his/her resume by saying AWS is using her/his project.

    Get the right OSS license?
  • 2
    @theabbie Licenses on GitHub are legally binding though
  • 0
    @12bitfloat Still, If you want real claim on code so that people don't dare to steal, you should go for real world licenses.
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