An analogous experience: I once chaired an American Bar Association committee that developed and published "fair and balanced" model software license provisions, extensively annotated. Twice in the following year, in working on client deals, lawyers for The Other Side proposed draft license agreements that were indisputably copied wholesale from the model provisions — but with certain fair-play features omitted.
An Unbelievable Demo
261–270 of 478 posts
Re: An Unbelievable Demo
#262Almost been there. I was once hired and given some sources to work on by a company, and those were the same exact sources I wrote at another company years before, although my name and all recognizable comments were stripped, save for a few almost invisible traces I left like my initials paired with reserved words to make them appear like directives, pragmas, etc. The guy who had given me the "new" sources was without…
I for one wouldn't be so forgiving. Stripping the author's name from source code is an absolute no-go.
It's a textbook copyright violation and could earn the author at least four to five figures when he settles.
Re: An Unbelievable Demo
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand what bsdiff does, or is. I am a software developer and I frankly have no clue what I would ever use bsdiff for! I've read what it does (libraries for building and applying patches to binary files) and still don't really have a sense for what the purpose of this tool is. What are some real life use cases for it? When does a developer need such a tool?
Implementing software updates where you don't want to ship entire binaries again (and only the diff) would be one. In some video games the assets are also packed into massive binaries, so you don't want to ship gigabytes of data because you replaced one icon. Sadly many games do this anyway nowadays.
Speaking from experience, AAA games have quite a bit of architecture behind them that can date back a decade or two. So you end up with some tradeoffs. The code may be well-tuned, resource efficient, and mostly crash proof, but some elements can be a bit dated relative to the size and scale of modern assets.
Re: An Unbelievable Demo
#264What rights does a developer have in these cases? Can you get some compensation/damages for the license/copyright violation even if you were giving away the software originally?
Can you get more money if they violate the OSS license if you offer the software under a commercial license as well?
Re: An Unbelievable Demo
#265> I've learned ... instead to simply say "I have a lot of experience with that technology" and leave it at that. Shows Brendan's maturity. I am not sure what should be the appropriate reaction or corrective measure in these situations. We should talk more about handling these unfair situations. Someone else can become more successful building on top of one's open source project. On a resume, a top contributor and a m…
Thanks. There was a time when many observability products were adding latency heat maps, and at one conference expo floor there were three companies with latency heat maps on their screen at the same time, pitching them as a flagship feature. If I walked near them they'd start trying to explain them to me, and I never figured out an appropriate response. If I said "hey, great to see you added them, I invented these b…
Still, it must be quite rewarding to know that everyone, no matter how big is using your tools. Before i knew anything about open source, i was somewhat surprised to see that even the giant that is Apple had open source licenses on their iPod. I assumed that apple had enough resources to develop all their own software, but no, they go just like everyone else and pick off-the-shelf software.
Re: An Unbelievable Demo
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
Implementing software updates where you don't want to ship entire binaries again (and only the diff) would be one. In some video games the assets are also packed into massive binaries, so you don't want to ship gigabytes of data because you replaced one icon. Sadly many games do this anyway nowadays.
There are other solutions to this problem that the game industry uses. Binary diff patching is slow, incremental, involves large diffs and has the possibility of corruption. It was used back in the mid 90's (RTPatch was the big name), but really isn't used anymore because of the drawbacks. Games frequently use an override directory or file. The patch contains only the files that have changed and is loaded after the m…
Yes, overrides. I've heard talks on this at conferences with a couple big publishers. A lot of effort is put into it but obviously if we were distributing OS security updates like Apple it would be a whole different ballgame.
Re: An Unbelievable Demo
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
I for one wouldn't be so forgiving. Stripping the author's name from source code is an absolute no-go.
It's a textbook copyright violation and could earn the author at least four to five figures when he settles.
Only if the copyright was registered before the infraction can you file for punitive damages. Otherwise you’re only eligible for actual damages.
Re: An Unbelievable Demo
#268I had a similar, smaller scale of that happen, in a sort of reverse direction a few years ago. My director dropped a resume on my desk for someone coming from a company I had worked at ten years prior, thinking I might have met them (it was a small organization). I didn't recognize the name, but skimmed through the resume quickly, and their primary claim on their work history was something I invented just six months…
I thought this was going in the direction that I experienced. I had a recruiter try to recruit me for the position that I was already in (we were expanding the team, not replacing me).
Re: An Unbelievable Demo
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you have a game, where you have large packs of files (like a 2GB sized textures.pak), and in a patch you want to add 2 small things, you can just ship the differencd between the old anc new pack file, and skip transferring the rest.
They do this, but not as a binary diff. The new files are just shipped as an override of the old files that are loaded after the old files. It's substainally faster than applying a binary diff and file sizes really aren't a concern for the most part. The game industry really hasn't used binary diffs and patching since the 90s when they used RTPatch.
I've noticed.
Flight Simulator downloads tens of GB every time I start it. :-/
Re: An Unbelievable Demo
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
> One of the reasons games do this is the data is compressed, so a "patch" might be indistinguishable from a real update. Does this happen with more advanced compression algorithms? I've rsynced zip files of different versions of internal software and the diff was always much, much smaller than the entire package.
Kind of an aside from your question, but binary patches not being much smaller than the full thing might happen more with modern games? Heresay, but from what I've heard modern games may ship multiple copies of some assets with different levels or features so they can be loaded as a sequential read off the disk. While a block-oriented compression algorithm might sync up more reliably, if you're packing 200MB of asset…
Windows game devs just traditionally didn't treat things with such granularity as you might find in a *nix environment where every little thing is a file. Content is then managed as larger blobs and you have a database of offsets or mappings.