The arrangement with my code is the same as with my text. I create, you consume.
1–10 of 39 posts
Re: The arrangement with my code is the same as with my text. I create, you consume.
#2Part of the problem is that there are a number of completely orthogonal ways to aggrieve an author: Infringement of Copyright, Infringement of Moral Rights (droit d'auteur, unauthorized alteration of the work or attribution), Plagiarism, Breach of Contract, etc.
Here he's asserting his Moral Rights. Alteration is covered in the US by All Rights Reserved as it'd be a derivative work, but you'd have to lean on trademarks and libel/slander to fully enforce your rights regarding attribution.
Re: The arrangement with my code is the same as with my text. I create, you consume.
#3The previous thread he mentions regarding HATETRIS: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1253492
Re: The arrangement with my code is the same as with my text. I create, you consume.
#4I understand exactly how the OP feels. I still get like that, even when I have explicitly released something as open-source.
The way I see it if someone contributes to your codebase you still have the right, and the obligation, to veto that code if you don't feel it matches your philosophies and quality standards. Asserting your preferences is the only way the code is still going to be 'yours'. If your idea of good code matches up with other people's, great! If not, the code will still be 'your baby'.
Re: The arrangement with my code is the same as with my text. I create, you consume.
#5The author has inadvertantly stumbled upon a part of hacker culture with wide-ranging implications, that is almost never discussed—and that is that people expect that you publish code because you want it to be changed, and not simply read. This stems from a deeply-rooted tradition in programming of not reading a codebase until you have a problem with it that you must fix. People don't "read for pleasure" in the programming world; they don't even read to learn—have you ever had a school assignment that charged you with reading more than 1KSLOC? The only reason, as a programmer, I will ever "cd src/", is that I am on a mission to fix a problem. Therefore, publishing code but reserving the right to derivative works, looks a bit like gloating, or showing off—"look what I did! Look how smart I am! It's no benefit to you... but look!"
This makes perfect sense in the art world (and writing is a form of art), as you never really "derive" from a piece of art; instead, you first look at the mechanisms by which it communicated its message to add those techniques to your repitoire of skills, and then re-use those skills on your own works. That makes perfect sense in an artistic medium, where any single stroke or word or note may be chosen from an infinitude of options—but programming requires formal grammar—a finite set of ways of expressing each concept—and thus there is relatively little merit in studying the technique by which a single problem was solved.
On a separate note, for the first few paragraphs he seems to be completely unaware of the medium of fan-fiction—which is about as core to "the culture of online fiction" as you can find.
Re: The arrangement with my code is the same as with my text. I create, you consume.
#6The author has inadvertantly stumbled upon a part of hacker culture with wide-ranging implications, that is almost never discussed—and that is that people expect that you publish code because you want it to be changed , and not simply read . This stems from a deeply-rooted tradition in programming of not reading a codebase until you have a problem with it that you must fix . People don't "read for pleasure" in the pr…
People don't "read for pleasure" in the programming world; they don't even read To learn—have you ever had a school assignment that charged you with reading more than 1KSLOC? The only reason, as a programmer, I will ever "cd src/", is that I am on a mission to fix a problem.
Seriously? As a programmer, the problem I'm often on a mission to fix in /src is that I haven't learned enough.
Re: The arrangement with my code is the same as with my text. I create, you consume.
#7The author has inadvertantly stumbled upon a part of hacker culture with wide-ranging implications, that is almost never discussed—and that is that people expect that you publish code because you want it to be changed , and not simply read . This stems from a deeply-rooted tradition in programming of not reading a codebase until you have a problem with it that you must fix . People don't "read for pleasure" in the pr…
People don't "read for pleasure" in the programming world; they don't even read To learn—have you ever had a school assignment that charged you with reading more than 1KSLOC? The only reason, as a programmer, I will ever "cd src/", is that I am on a mission to fix a problem. Seriously? As a programmer , the problem I'm often on a mission to fix in /src is that I haven't learned enough.
Yes: you are in a minority within a minority. Of the programmers who read to further their education after school is done with (an already-small number), most will be complacent to read books, or blogs, or at the most journal articles. The number who dive into a foreign codebase—that is, one they have no association with and don't rely on for anything—without the expectation of eventually contributing something (i.e. In OSS) is vanishingly small.
Re: The arrangement with my code is the same as with my text. I create, you consume.
#8The authors basically says that it does not always like when people changes his stuff, so he thinks it's fine to do a kind of read only open source with additional unwritten rights (basically i've got the impression that it's okay to send him he likes, but he won't tell you before the rules for him to like things or not...)
He does not take into account at all that you can just modify copies of his stuff. Not his own (unless he planned to do a kind of wikipedia like repository for his code, freely modifiable by anybody without even registration).
And also: copies are naturally free in the digital age.
Also, i'm not fond the whole "i'm a good programmer, you are only allowed to look because you could be a bad one and do a mess in your own copy -- and oh I forgot: I happen to like free software, but not when I write the program" thing.
Re: The arrangement with my code is the same as with my text. I create, you consume.
#9The author has inadvertantly stumbled upon a part of hacker culture with wide-ranging implications, that is almost never discussed—and that is that people expect that you publish code because you want it to be changed , and not simply read . This stems from a deeply-rooted tradition in programming of not reading a codebase until you have a problem with it that you must fix . People don't "read for pleasure" in the pr…
> ... people expect that you publish code because you want it to be changed, and not simply read.
Browser-interpreted code makes this quite a fuzzy issue. What are the rules with running tools like GreaseMonkey? Is there a legal or moral line that shouldn't be crossed with tools like GM?
As an aside, I wonder if there is any gender bias in the "publish code"-->"you want it changed" conclusion. I've observe that females tend to state problems in order to find empathy, and males tend to state problems in order to find solutions (of course, this is a gross simplification). Mixing these two types when a problem presents itself can sometimes result in conflict. Perhaps the same tendencies in people sometimes conflict over code (i.e., some present code to look at and admire, others see it as an opportunity for improvement).
Re: The arrangement with my code is the same as with my text. I create, you consume.
#10I would guess the majority of source code available online is explicitly open source. So it's reasonable to assume that this particular bit of source code available online is also (intended to be) open source, if there's no indication otherwise. Fiction is not the same, for various reasons: a work of fiction posted online is probably not "open source" (creative commons or similar), so that's not the default assumption with unlabelled fiction.
This is just culture clash. You're coming from a writer background and publishing things for people coming from a hacker background. If you explicitly state "this is not free software: look but don't touch", people will at least understand what your expectations are. Not everyone will understand or agree with you, but most will respect your wishes.
Similarly, I suspect a hacker-turned-writer would be likely to have a similar attitude to his fiction as to his code, and use a CC license. Or artists in general, actually: two examples I can think of are Randall Munroe and Jonathan Coulton.