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My open source project got stolen by a HN user

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Re: My open source project got stolen by a HN user

#31

The first thing that came to my mind after reading your post was the philmarilion from 4chan. Collecting these posts and submitting them with all these commentaries is.. a bit creepy. I find collecting stuff to be a good idea, but publishing them in this manner is another thing, seems to be a very knee-jerk reaction. When I compare the two projects, I do see that you are right, he obviously just copy-pasted, I do und…

Thanks for the suggestion. I haven't experienced this before so I'm not even sure how to react. I'm just astonished that people like this exist, taking work that you know isn't yours and pitching investors and other devs as your own? I'm sorry, I think this guy needs to be put on blast. I tried doing this in a more diplomatic way through our Discord dms, but in no moment was any expression of regret or wrong doing br…

Your coming off as childish. Anyone can take your code and use it in whatever way they want. If you wanted to use a license where you keep ownership choose a different license.

If an investor will give them money good for them. If devs gives them praise good for them.

You gave the code away in the hopes someone would use it. Someone is.. you were the author to the first guy who took it. He is the author to the next group who forks.

It's like you came up with a joke and shared it. That person love it and retold it as his own.

Re: My open source project got stolen by a HN user

#34
post #30

In the age of LLM , MIT credit become irrelevant because I could just let AI digest whole repository and let it spit out code that is unrecognizable to yours and everyone can just claim - this code is generated by AI, or they wrote them. AI not gonna give credit at all.

Although LLMs can be used and is being used as the tornado cash of copyright and such things, it doesnt guarantee an escape from legal repercussions in the future, it’s an ongoing debate with a lot of uncertainty and certainly more tooling will arrive to identify traces to origins

Re: My open source project got stolen by a HN user

#35
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the suggestion. I haven't experienced this before so I'm not even sure how to react. I'm just astonished that people like this exist, taking work that you know isn't yours and pitching investors and other devs as your own? I'm sorry, I think this guy needs to be put on blast. I tried doing this in a more diplomatic way through our Discord dms, but in no moment was any expression of regret or wrong doing br…

Your coming off as childish. Anyone can take your code and use it in whatever way they want. If you wanted to use a license where you keep ownership choose a different license. If an investor will give them money good for them. If devs gives them praise good for them. You gave the code away in the hopes someone would use it. Someone is.. you were the author to the first guy who took it. He is the author to the next g…

Hard disagree. Plagiarizing an entire source repo and claiming it as your own with zero attribution to the other original author makes you a bona fide raging pile of human garbage. Every other field seems to have a basic system of ethics in place when it comes to this kind of thing, I don't know what it is about the software industry that makes devs so shameless.

Re: My open source project got stolen by a HN user

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The /source directory in his repo is 90% our code. But look, I'm not mad he is using our project, it's open source after all. I'm happy it is and people can do whatever with the code. What I'm exposing here is an attempt at making people believe he is the author of said code. Not someone who took 90% of a project and is building something with it, but that he wrote the entirety of the code.

This a comparison of the src folders using Meld: https://postimg.cc/sM2HDP7G In the scrollbars on the right, blue is modified, green is new, black is equal. Only a handful of hooks, helpers and simple components are still the same. 90% sounds quite far from reality. Not that I think the lack of credit given to the original project isn’t scummy, but… it’s just someone being an asshole, not much you can do about that.

Have you verified that those changes are not something trivial like formatting?

Re: My open source project got stolen by a HN user

#37
I think you have an issue with what open source means. He does mention outstatic in his repo and it seems that your project is one of many he's using. It seems like he's better than you at keep developing/selling the project, you should find a way to benefit from it, for example selling outstatic to his audience.

Edit: just checked the difference in stats of the project and his project is so smaller. I think you are complaining about nothing - soft and hard forks are the norm.

Re: My open source project got stolen by a HN user

#38

Relevant portion below, taken from this page ( https://dev.to/sadeedpv/someone-copied-my-code-on-github-and... ): 'With the MIT license, you should really also put your copyright and license notices at the top of each source file in a comment in addition to the license file in the repo. This way if someone uses one or more files but not entire repo, your copyright notice and license declaration stays with your code,…

No way, especially with bigger licenses that are hard-breaked, it's such a wasteful tax on readers' attention to have the first page of every file be some legal garbage

And the risk of copy&pasting just the code someone needs (it's not always/mostly at a file level) doesn't disappear

Re: My open source project got stolen by a HN user

#39
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the suggestion. I haven't experienced this before so I'm not even sure how to react. I'm just astonished that people like this exist, taking work that you know isn't yours and pitching investors and other devs as your own? I'm sorry, I think this guy needs to be put on blast. I tried doing this in a more diplomatic way through our Discord dms, but in no moment was any expression of regret or wrong doing br…

Your coming off as childish. Anyone can take your code and use it in whatever way they want. If you wanted to use a license where you keep ownership choose a different license. If an investor will give them money good for them. If devs gives them praise good for them. You gave the code away in the hopes someone would use it. Someone is.. you were the author to the first guy who took it. He is the author to the next g…

In your example, he is claiming he came up with the joke. That's different isn't it?

Re: My open source project got stolen by a HN user

#40
If you're really bothered by it, find a lawyer that will push the license issue further. You can get your product's name/license in there where credit is due.

Other than that, all you can do is build a better project (product?). It's the nature of the beast in open source... people steal constantly. You built something and were successful enough to have it stolen (at least once).

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