Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to take credit for someone else's work on GitHub

repography.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 185 posts

Re: How to take credit for someone else's work on GitHub

#111

Post by totony »

hyperhopper wrote: post #109
totony wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does it matter if someone can claim your commits? Doesn't seem important imo.

Since [by default] you own the IP for code you commit, this is effectively claiming to steal intellectual property. Also professional credit and fame, which can directly relate to employment opportunities.

AFAICT they can only claim it because you haven't claimed it so

>which can directly relate to employment opportunities.

doesn't seem right.

Agreed on the copyright part of the equation, but I don't think many people take the commit author on GitHub as the copyright owner.

Re: How to take credit for someone else's work on GitHub

#113

Post by teawrecks »

angus-g wrote: post #78
trulyme wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, yes, but maybe they should? It doesn't seem like a huge feature...

What about if somebody clones a repo, then adds a .mailmap pointing all the addresses in the history to their own?

Then in their clone, they made all the commits. But who cares about their clone?

Re: How to take credit for someone else's work on GitHub

#114

Post by guessmyname »

j3s wrote: post #75

how many email addresses can a person associate with their account? is there the potential for me to develop a bot that scrapes every "unclaimed" email address and claim them? seems like a very poor design choice.

As of today (Feb 28th, 2022) GitHub allows you to add up to twenty (20) unverified email addresses to your account. When you reach that limit, you will be presented with the following error message “Please verify one or more of your unverified emails before adding another.”

Re: How to take credit for someone else's work on GitHub

#115

Post by Aeolun »

leni536 wrote: post #97
trulyme wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, yes, but maybe they should? It doesn't seem like a huge feature...

Now which commit's mailmap file should be used for the association? Whatever is on the "default" branch currently?

Whatever is in the branch you are looking at? Seems fairly straightforward.

Re: How to take credit for someone else's work on GitHub

#116

Post by [deleted] »

nynyny7 wrote: post #7

I do see a point in it working like it does, though. I'm one of the lead developers on a free software project with over 20 years of history. Even though the project has used multiple version control systems (and hosting providers) over time, we have imported our entire project's history going back to the very first commit into git and GitHub. Not every contributor has kept their email address for over 20 years. Some…

[deleted]

Re: How to take credit for someone else's work on GitHub

#117

Post by guessmyname »

anfractuosity wrote: post #53

What happens if multiple github users add the same unverified email address for a particular commit in a repo to their accounts, how does it know which github username to pick to display next to the commit?

An email address can only be associated to a single GitHub account.

If “Alice” adds alice@example.test to their account, GitHub will check if the email is not associated to an existing account, and then proceed to handle the request. Then, when “Bob” tries to add the same email to their account, GitHub prints the following error message “ Error adding alice@example.test: email is already in use.”

In your example, GitHub will display the username of the first user to add the (unverified) email to their account.

Re: How to take credit for someone else's work on GitHub

#118

Post by itake »

nebulous1 wrote: post #92
fragmede wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because that's git's underlying mechanisms in action. In a distributed system, there's no centralized database to check things against, so there's no (distributed) way to do verification, leading to the issue described here. With the use of public key cryptography, there's a disconnected way to authenticate commit, and it works as well as public key cryptography does, but GitHub has all the levers needed to moved the…

> Because that's git's underlying mechanisms in action. no? git just has an email field on the commit. it's github that has decided to allow people to associate unverified emails with their accounts, and also display this association whereever the email is listed in a commit.

I don't see how verifying the email fixes the problem. Emails (like domains) expire and the original user of the address may lose control of them.

Re: How to take credit for someone else's work on GitHub

#119

Post by sky_rw »

trombonechamp wrote: post #108

Or you can just do this: https://github.com/bhargavchippada/forceatlas2/commit/7438e2...

As I understand it, this is not permitted under the GNU General Public License v3.0. Is that correct? I would think that certain licenses do permit this (MIT possibly?). Could anybody with knowledge chime in?

Re: How to take credit for someone else's work on GitHub

#120

Post by jreese »

jodrellblank wrote: post #94
uncomputation wrote: post #3

GitHub’s response is pretty surprising. How can anyone think this is expected? Having to follow Git’s commit message emails makes sense and indeed anybody can use any email they want to make a commit. But then for GitHub to make the connection between (unverified) commit emails and (unverified) GitHub.com accounts is the issue for me. Since they can’t verify the commit email belongs to a GitHub account, why show that…

What happens if Linus Torvalds has a verified Github account, and I commit to my rudely named project on my local computer with his email address and then push to Github; do they then show the commit with his Github account because his Github email is verified?

Yes, and there are a number of past stunts that include forking the Linux repo, pushing fake/misleading commits, and then showing how Github lets you see those commits in a context that implies they are part of the upstream Linux repo.
Post reply on HN