it's worth stating publicly that copying people's code without attribution is plagiarism and is not cool.
yes, even if you don't respect the people who wrote it.
yes, even if the license nominally lets you (but it is likely that is *not* the case because it muddies the copyright information of the file. i am not, however, a lawyer).
@piegames @srtcd424 although it is true that plagiarism has been done by various members of the cppnix team and mic92 to lix code and forked nix-eval-jobs code written by a wide variety of people, it is a more general point that this is not fucking cool ever. i think we are up to our fourth incidence.
citing the source of your code helps a lot to anyone looking at it in the future as they can pull the original metadata and is basic decency to the people who wrote it.
@leftpaddotpy @piegames @srtcd424
yeah... citing the source is indeed basic decency.
IANAL either but almost every single FOSS license -- including MIT and other "permissive" licenses -- requires existing copyright notices to be kept intact. you cannot simply remove them.
funnily enough, tencent did cite my code as the source... but they replaced my copyright notice with their own and changed the license from GPL to BSD, which is very much a copyright/license violation.
@leftpaddotpy @piegames @srtcd424
Did not expect this; thought we were handling this responsibly.
I know Lix contributors were credited at least in the commits of our initial meson work.
We've also started listing the contributors to each release, based on the commits.
Where is it missing? I'd like to rectify any missing attributions.
@roberth @piegames this is the inciting frustration this time and tbh it's mostly not been cppnix doing it; there's been two instances of mic92 copying lix fork code, one with reformatting a square commit message (e: mixed up the author) and then not mentioning its provenance.
in short: please link the CLs and add a Co-authored-by when cherry picking a commit, especially if the git author metadata changes. it helps a lot to find the back story behind the code.
In the last months, I’ve heard several allegations about people copying foreign code into Nix projects without or with improper attribution. Part of the conflict here is that there is disagreement on what exactly constitutes proper attribution. I therefore propose to establish some agreed on rules, and put them somewhere in the contributor guidelines. Some ideas of mine, for a start: Source of truth for attribution must be the git history, everywhere else (GitHub etc.) is auxiliary. Attributio...
@piegames @leftpaddotpy No need for formal language like that. I'm pretty sure we agree on these values.
I've opened a PR for Nix's contributing page: https://github.com/NixOS/nix/pull/11280
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Steven Reed
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