this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023

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Hey guys, this time I really messed up :/ (kbin.social)

submitted 1 year ago by ernest@kbin.social to c/kbinMeta@kbin.social

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I think you should see something.

Like I mentioned many time before, this isn't my first attempt at creating an aggregator. Years ago, I built something similar, and back then I drew a lot of inspiration from Postmill. This time, to avoid starting from scratch, I get some elements from my old snippets. Originally, kbin was meant to be a project just for me and a few friends, so I didn't attribute the origin authors. That's not an excuse, though — I should have done it right away when the project became public on git. I have a point in my roadmap called "Preparing a repository for contributors," where I allocated a significant amount of time to educate myself about licenses, attributions, and so on. Unfortunately, everything unfolded in the wrong order.

https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/196

I think Emma is right. Since I share my small successes with you, I also want to be transparent about my failures and mistakes. I will push the proper attributions to the repository today along with some critical fixes.

To avoid reinventing the wheel, I took some code used in federation from Pixelfed as well. Essentially, there are two projects two projects will be marked. However, I have never concealed this fact:

https://kbin.social/m/random/p/254858/The-real-reason-why-I-haven-t-published-the-pixelfed-app#post-comment-438684

I mean that I'm not a guy who wants to steal your code. It's obvious that someone will take a look at the code of a project that is very similar to theirs. Sometimes, I just become terribly messy when I have to do many things at once. This lesson will definitely teach me to prioritize tasks better.

In the end, I can only promise that once everything settles down and I manage to extract a library for ActivityPub, I will revisit the Postmill repository, this time with a pull request proposal.

You should definitely check it out.

https://postmill.xyz/ - Project page
https://raddle.me/ - Postmill instance
https://pixelfed.org/ - Of course, everyone here is familiar with this one ;)

PS. the website should be running a bit faster. I will talk about it next time.

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[–] SeedyOne@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago

Appreciate the transparency Ernest.

[–] KbinItTogether@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

Frankly, it's very refreshing to see someone running the show that has this combination of work ethic, passion without hunger for power, and honesty. Thank you for the transparency!

You've obviously got a million things going on a minute here. Like someone juggling flaming swords, I don't think anyone is going to blame you for dropping one accidentally while more fire-soaked swords keep being tossed at you. Seems like you know what to do and that there are a lot of talented folks here willing to provide help anyway they can. We're with you (me in the sentimental sense, I'm not so talented when it comes to coding)!

[–] developerjustin@mastodon.social 1 points 1 year ago

@ernest I thought you killed someone, based on the title 😂

I agree with the other commenter. Seems like you’re making it right. This is a new and sometimes messy frontier for a lot of people and processes. If someone is worried about protecting their IP, this isn’t the hill to die on.

[–] effingjoe@kbin.social 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Is 'LitigiousEmma' an inside joke, or an extremely relevant username? haha

Edit: For some reason this keeps bouncing around in my head and the more I think about the more I believe that Emma should have contacted you privately (at first, anyway) instead of jumping right into attempting to publicly shame you.

[–] 0xtero@kbin.social 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Edit: For some reason this keeps bouncing around in my head and the more I think about the more I believe that Emma should have contacted you privately (at first, anyway) instead of jumping right into attempting to publicly shame you.

The issue tracker for kbin codebase was the correct place to submit the complaint.

Licensing issues are tricky and if you're the copyright holder there's no way to know if people stealing your code are acting in good faith or not. Best course of action is to document and report the violations "officially". You need to have a clear track record in case the other part is going to try to deny or obfuscate the situation.

It was the right thing to do.

As for the tone and the username.
From what I can see, she's the main dev for that codebase and has been for many, many years. She gets to decide the tone, she's the one who's defending her rights and work.

Having said that, ernest handled it well - and is clearly acting in good faith. So that should be the end of that.

[–] slowd0wn@kbin.social 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I’m not a coder, so hopefully you can answer my question. When using open source code, does each instance of borrowed code need to be “tagged” and identified to attribute to the original author? My brain keeps telling me that all this code needs is a MLA reference page, but after reading this post I’m assuming it’s more difficult than that.

[–] bspar@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 year ago

Yup that's basically it. If you have some electronic device (like an Android or iPhone), you can go to some sort of "about phone" setting page and poke around for a licenses button that'll show you all the software that your device uses. It's just proper attribution.

I've done reverse engineering and found obvious illegally used GPL code in closed source projects, and they could (theoretically) get in big trouble for not following the license. (I anonymously requested their source based on the terms of the license, but the company threatened to sue for reverse engineering, so it's often not worth it)

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[–] anthoniix@kbin.social 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I honestly don't see this as a big deal, but I'm glad that you're being honest and open. Attribution is cool and all, but Emma makes it sound like you committed some sort of cardinal sin. I can never understand why someone who uses a permissive license gets so upset when their work is not attributed, you gain almost nothing from it.

Again though, attribution is still a net good. I think it's the polite thing to do, and I'm glad you're doing it.

[–] sab@kbin.social 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

When you ask for very little (credit for your hard work), it's even more infuriating when you're deprived of it. You could compare it to stealing ideas in academia - the omission of one tiny reference makes a huge difference.

That said, there is such a thing as a honest mistake, and Ernest is handling it in the best way possible. But there are enough instances of permissive licences being abused that I don't blame the original author for initially taking it badly.

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