An Unbelievable Demo

I am British but have lived in [redacted] for a while now and I feel the same as you about [redacted].

If Brexit showed us anything it is that the UK is no way near as important as they like to think they are. Watching the UK and [redacted] at loggerheads has been a mix of frustration and amusement for someone like myself clearly caught in the crossfire.

As an "outsider" in [redacted] my biggest complaint is the staunch opposition to change. Any change. As you say they simply cannot look ahead. It is as if they only know how to live in their past glories rather than working towards future ones.

The UK is sort of the opposite but in a terribly executed manner. They have dreams of the future but do everything possible to make those dreams harder to achieve due to arrogance they can "do it alone". Harping back to "the good old days of the Empire" and "Blitz spirit!" as if the Blitz was some wonderful time (wtf?).

The sad thing is the [redacted] could learn a lot from each other but seems both sides are too myopic to do so.

Please try to refrain from personal attacks on people. It’s very disrespectful, especially when someone has clearly dedicated so much of their time to public works.

There's a long industry history of stealing code, but I'm surprised to hear this story of Sun allegedly doing it.

My impression is that reason for the stealing usually makes sense. For example, a key library that's hard to write that's just copied into the source tree, ignoring licensing. Or an appliance developer didn't want to deal with licensing for Linux or BusyBox. Or an individual developer in over their head quietly copies code.

The time I heard an explainable incident happened with my code, was in mid/late-'90s. An acquaintance, who'd offered to be one of the testers for an unreleased Java desktop application I wrote, then reportedly ran it through a decompiler, and passed it off as his own code, in a demo to investors. He later acknowledged doing this, and said he'd send me a Sun (ha) workstation as compensation. I declined.

Then there are incidents for which the reason isn't obvious, like the one from the article. I speculate that sometimes the explanation might simply be that the perpetrator wasn't quite right in the head at the time, like in some famous cases of journalism fabrication.

An inexplicable one involving my code was when an open source developer took a substantial and novel package that I wrote, stripped out my name and license notices, including out of the main file, and posted the package with themself identified as the author. There were also a couple other incidents with that person that seemed like that hadn't yet learned how to play well with others, in engineering or open source. I asked a mutual acquaintance, in confidence, what was going on with that person. The acquaintance checked, and was also baffled. In that case, I suppose that maybe the perpetrator was going through a difficult time, and not thinking clearly. Or maybe it was a combination of unlikely accidents that looked worse than the intent was (which happens).

In the article's story of the Sun incident, I'm a little surprised that (speculating) an engineer could do this despite all the other people in engineering who might be in a position to notice something funny going on. And Sun had been the dot in some dotcoms by 2005, so presumably they had some strong engineering processes around what goes into product.

Maybe the demo was something put together by a systems engineer, working as part of a small marketing/sales team, rather than under an engineering organization, so a lot fewer engineers were aware of it?

From the same place taxes come, or more generally, quite a lot of social obligations. It's the expectation that, if you're benefiting from commons, you should also contribute something back to the commons.

A company using open source software to make money is making money off commons. Makes sense they should feel obliged to contribute something back, and since they have the surplus of the best form of contribution - money - it's reasonable to expect them to donate some of it.