Comment by wyldfire

Comment by wyldfire 3 days ago

14 replies

Plagiarism is a moral wrong.

But copyright infringement is a legal wrong (a civil liability).

Is what they're doing infringing on a copyrighted work? Or does it fail to uphold license terms? Many open source licenses have some amount of attribution as a requirement, so that'd be something to consider.

bjt 3 days ago

It's addressed in the post. MIT license. Zigbook is not honoring the attribution requirement. A PR to change that was closed and obfuscated.

  • anonnon 3 days ago

    > Zigbook is not honoring the attribution requirement

    It's crazy how many people treat MIT as if it were public domain.

    • Zambyte 3 days ago

      I genuinely believe more people violate permissive licenses than copyleft license. I have no data to back this up, but just look at how much people focused on if LLMs were violating the GPL by reproducing code covered by the GPL without reproducing the license. If LLMs violate the GPL, they violate all licenses besides ones that are effectively public domain.

    • adrian17 3 days ago

      This probably depends on country, but AFAIK in most of europe, even in public domain, the „you can’t pass another’s work as your own” part of copyright is still active and doesn’t expire.

      • poly2it 3 days ago

        This piques my interest, what is the legally required recognition of a derivative's parent work? Must I be able to list dependencies, or should I be able to verify whether a parent work is included in mine? What if my work is a second derivative of a work which I am unaware of, because the work in between improperly didn't recognise its parent? Am I legally responsible to investigate such cases?

        • projektfu 3 days ago

          Something like, "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith" is probably sufficient.

lenkite 3 days ago

AI is actually beginning to encourage "restricted source", public-only-gets-binary debates to simply avoid such legal issues.

Write a snail-mail letter to get the real sources. Repositories are private with a small well-vetted list of contributors. Also avoid slop-PR headaches that away.

  • femiagbabiaka 3 days ago

    If you were licensing MIT, ostensibly it’s not the copying you care about, just the attribution. There is always the option to turn off prs, or even distribute code without using github.

  • tliltocatl 3 days ago

    Sorry, this sounds like the absolutely worst idea ever. The way to kill open source as such. Sloppy PRs will end when the idiot HRs release there is no value in them. Plagiarism isn't really anything new and AI doesn't really change much there. But adding friction to examining source is a sure way to make no one care to contribute.

    • bigfishrunning 3 days ago

      Honest question, what are "HR"s? I only know that acronym for "Human Resources" and I don't understand how that has anything to do with code contribution

      • tliltocatl 2 days ago

        > Human Resources > code contribution

        Activity on github - must be a productive programmer. Have a thousand issues open - definitely a hire. I'm not talking about the Valley, but in India, as well as some some backwaters in the West that's how it seems to be. Talk about misaligned incentives.