Ask HN: Plagiarism on GitHub – What to do?

Hi everyone,

I've been working on a command line tool for more than 6 months.

A member on Github changed the name of the project, reduced the number of features by removing 3rd-party libraries (all of them are optional in my CLI), and took the entire idea including modularity, plugins and even the mac logo () on the title of the project.

He should have created Pull Requests to contribute to the project instead of modifying the original project and posting it as a separate project in 4 days (vs 6 months that it took to me to organize and create all that code).

100% of the changes he made could have been made through Pull Requests.

If someone wants to take a look and contribute to the original project, this is the URL: https://github.com/guarinogabriel/Mac-CLI

What would you do if this happens with your project?

Please let me know your thoughts.

Thanks!

Two answers:

1) You could potentially use a DMCA claim to take down the repo, if there has been a license violation. But:

2) This is not plagiarism. You put the code under a license that says almost-literally "do anything you want with this code", and they did. There is no legal obligation to use pull requests instead of forks.

> What would you do if this happens with your project?

Probably ignore it. If your version is better, people will use it instead. If it isn't, that's life.

His license requires that his credit be retained. If the new project didn't do that (which I'm assuming it didn't), it's both plagiarism and a copyright violation (which aren't the same thing).

If the new project did retain his credit, then, yeah, he's got no legal recourse.

I found the supposed plagiarism and I'm not seeing it. From what I can see, it's all original code and while what you made is thoroughly useful and certainly took a lot of work, it's not exactly uncommon. You've created a very comprehensive, plugin-ready, Mac-specific bash config. Yours handles numerous cases, this person wrote their own handling a smaller set of cases that works better for them. Traceur[0] was one of the first major JavaScript transpilers. Does that mean Babel[1] is plagiarism?

[0] https://github.com/google/traceur-compiler

[1] https://babeljs.io/

Thanks for your comment. My concern is that all the changes introduced by the other project could have been done through pull requests.

Also, the other project wouldn't exist if my project wasn't there. One thing is being inspired, another one is creating a separate project that is dividing the community effort in two, instead of focusing in one project.