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What should I do when someone blatantly copy my open-source project on GitHub?

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Re: What should I do when someone blatantly copy my open-source project on GitHub?

#41

>> In every licensed file, original copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices must be preserved Well, Edwinkys, it's your fault for not adding a copyright notice to each file. I recommend add one now at least, so future forks will have your name it it. Something like this: https://github.com/aquarians/Public/blob/main/Aquarians/Back...

I see. I am not quite familiar with the legality of the licensing and stuff. I will keep this in mind for future reference.

Re: What should I do when someone blatantly copy my open-source project on GitHub?

#42

Someone copied a gist of mine from 2011, changed my name and made a blogpost about it. Let them be, no point in wasting time worrying about small fraudsters. Cut them off and blacklist them so you will never have anything to do with them. I recommend not to shame them publicly if you live in a country without freedom of speech (most of the world except from the USA) or they might have grounds for suing you for defama…

Sorry to hear that happen to you. I agree. I don't plan to escalate it. My current plan is to reach out to them and maybe report it to GitHub if ignored.

Re: What should I do when someone blatantly copy my open-source project on GitHub?

#43
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, thank you for your suggestion. I tried to read the license and if I'm not mistaken, they need to attribute the copyright to the original project, no?

For better or worse, your license is as good as your wherewithal to enforce it. This is a matter for your lawyers.

Yeah, that's probably true. I'm just an indie dev looking for a job and bringing lawyers into this probably wouldn't make sense for my situation.

Re: What should I do when someone blatantly copy my open-source project on GitHub?

#44
post #23

It looks like the person doing the copying didn't even bother to change the pictures properly (the background does not match). So I think if your great project lives on, this copy work is going to be just a bad and unsuccessful fork, maybe even one of few. Don't spend too much effort on this and just try to focus on your own project.

Yeah! That's what I noticed as well from the banner.

Re: What should I do when someone blatantly copy my open-source project on GitHub?

#45
post #32

Not the first repo he is plagiarizing. One of the first things I see when visiting his profile: https://github.com/obaraelijah/redis-proto From: https://github.com/dpbriggs/redis-oxide But Elijah Samson / obaraelijah / elly sam has started removing or making repositories private now that he has been found out.

It seems like it. I'm curious as to why would he do this? Some people say that it's for portfolio to get a job. But wouldn't recruiter be able to tell that this is not their work?

Re: What should I do when someone blatantly copy my open-source project on GitHub?

#47
post #33
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's hope Elijah Samson, AKA obaraelijah, AKA elly sam, AKA Sahomey Technologies, AKA Sahomey-Technologies will learn from this.

Oh wow, looks like he's also published it to the rust package repository. The rabbit-hole deepens. https://crates.io/crates/sahomedb/0.2.1 Also bragging about it on Medium: https://medium.com/@ellysam/introducing-sahomedb-a-high-perf... Also another pseudonym or his "team": https://medium.com/@samowvance10/the-purpose-of-my-project-a... At least searching for some of these entries links back to this HN post.

Yeah, it's so weird (and shameless).

Re: What should I do when someone blatantly copy my open-source project on GitHub?

#48

You may always put an "innocent" looking file into the output binary that states who is the actual authors. Say you may create AUTHORS file in your repo, but store a SHA512 of that file in some obscure file in resources e.g. META-INF/ArtifactSignId, don't automate this step in any way, do it manually. A lot of people that are mindlessly copy'ing your work will not bother doing anything more than remove some stuff & s…

Yeah, I think they're just trying to ramp up the GitHub profile. But you're suggestion is some next level cool stuff there and I'll definitely keep it in mind.

Re: What should I do when someone blatantly copy my open-source project on GitHub?

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For better or worse, your license is as good as your wherewithal to enforce it. This is a matter for your lawyers.

Yeah, that's probably true. I'm just an indie dev looking for a job and bringing lawyers into this probably wouldn't make sense for my situation.

I understand and empathize. At least the bad behavior doesn’t affect your ability to buy groceries and you probabaly have a better understanding of the bullshit in online discussions of software licenses.

People argue about licenses as if there are software license cops. There aren’t. Having money to pay lawyers to enforce your license is a reasonable reason to develop paid software.

Re: What should I do when someone blatantly copy my open-source project on GitHub?

#50

It's Apache licensed. Clause 4 does say some things about accreditation, etc. IANAL, but simplifying the [what-I-call] legal enumeration, it says: "You must retain, in the Source form of any Derivative Works that You distribute, all copyright notices from the Source form of the Work". Did you put any copyright notices in your work? If not, it may be too late, because they can continue to distribute the old version th…

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