2y ago

Hey guys, this time I really messed up :/

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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50 comments

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.
- 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.
  
  Hi Emma!
  
  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.
  
  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)

50 comments