I agree that it is good practice to show attribution, and not directly lie saying you wrote something yourself. However the MIT license doesn't require that.
There are a lot of open source licenses that give more protections to the original author. I have a theory that too many people choose MIT just because it is simple, but don't think through what they actually want from a license.
It's also kind of stupid to rip someone off. Assuming all the information here is accurate, this could really come back to bite the guy who ripped him off - someone is going to google what you've done and will end up with this blog post slamming you. If it was an honest mistake, the author should probably take the time to fix the posts and apologize.
In this case, it was present in the LICENSE file in the github repository he links to.
Not preserving it is a clear license violation in this case, since they took substantial portions of the software.
If I made changes to the software, would I just add myself to the Copyright list of authors?
But it doesn't mean "claim it as your own", as long as it's not significantly altered.
No, you cannot relicense. Only the original authors can do that. You can add on top of the existing code stuff of your own under a different license, so that the combination of the two is under both licenses. Practically, it amounts to almost the same, but for example, you cannot remove conditions such as attribution, which only the original authors can do via a license that does not require attribution.
It depends what was meant by derivative and how this impacts the original code (encapsulated, modified, etc...). I was thinking more of when you use an MIT-licensed lib or 3rd party tool, or when you would reuse a code-snippet licensed as MIT and modify it. License and attributions remain, but only for that part of the code.
This is why a lot of projects (ie clojure) require some sort of contributor agreement so that the original authors can retain control while still accepting contributions.
Here's a super-long answer:
You can if you want attribution. the problem with this is that the licenses refer to the "above copyright notice", and most people put the license in headers.
So as you might imagine, if you have 50 files, with different contributors, and they all list their names in the appropriate notices so that you have different notices on each file, well then, Congrats, now people using the software have to reproduce 50 notices!
This becomes a mess, and it also turns out that other than the license referring to it, the notice is legally pointless.
It is cargo cult lawyering to have copyright notices for legal reasons. It isn't required in any berne signatory country (all 168 of them: http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ShowResults.jsp?treaty_id=15). It has basically no legal usefulness[1]
As a result, the better practice is to just use something that is legally okay, but more inclusive.
This is why when chromium was released, i had them put "The chromium authors" as the copyright owner. It's legally correct/valid, but means nobody has to add stuff to it.
[1] In the US, it prevents the innocent infringement defense. But the innocent infringement defense requires that A. you bought a license B. from someone you reasonably believed owned the code because of the incorrect copyright notice
Because of the legal standard, I cannot find a single successful innocent infringement defense since Berne.
That's not true.
https://github.com/minimaxir/reddit-bigquery/blob/master/LIC...
> Copyright (c) 2015 Max Woolf
[...]
> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
Neither the output of computer software, nor the ideas themselves within software, are protected by copyright. Not providing attribution is simply douchey.
Just following the minimum requirements of a license may not be a nice thing to do, but if you're going to be upset because someone did something you said they could but that you didn't really want them too, I can't really sympathize.
When I was a teenager I did something similar and was caught. I ripped off someone else's site design. The guy wasn't happy, but his response taught me a lot. I'm thankful he didn't put my name out there for the vigilantes of the internet to come calling and I learned to respect the work and creativity of others.
1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above
copyright notice, this list of conditions and the
following disclaimer.
I have had my own free software used in ways I don't like, but I don't write a blog post about it. After all, I made it free. You want to insult me, mock me, satirise me, print out the source code and wipe your butt with it; go ahead. That's part of what free software must allow.
Point is, require with legalese what you want people to do. It's your prerogative.
Above all, don't code call copying "stealing". This is not theft. It might not even be copyright infringement. Calling it "stealing" is undue indignation that indicates that they did something worse than what you explicitly allowed.
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.[1]: http://www.pixelstech.net/article/1408152349-The-9-lines-of-...
> As my code is MIT-licensed, there’s nothing legally preventing the use of my code this way. However, I’m not going to change my workflow; I will still open-source my data visualization code, and it will have the same licensing. It wouldn’t be fair to punish others who have made very good use of my code.
> But outright using the code, without any attribution, and claiming it as your own when it blatantly isn’t, is a jerk move.
He's legally wrong, however ;-)
Let me clarify:
The MIT license does not prevent someone using the code to do a visualization without crediting him. It does, however, prevent taking those snippets without reproducing the copyright notice
For anyone who wants to argue about the copyrightability of it, i'll point out
A. Google is being sued for 2.6 billion dollars over 9 lines of range check code
B. While copyright has some notion of de-minimis, it's not a bright line in the code space. Copyright is more about originality. You can't really say, less than ten lines, do what you want. 10 lines of java does nothing. 10 lines of perl could be an entire OS.
If I were a Google exec I'd strongly consider dumping a few million in sponsoring some developers to make postgres's clustering options feature competitive with RAC. You'd never unseat it in some places but a long term commitment to support development from a heavy hitter like Google might go a long way.
No, there isn't. Which, by the norms and conventions of the gift economy that open source software defines, jerks like this should be named and shamed for this sort of parasitism. Which is what this blog article is doing.
You live by the sword, you die by the sword.
False! This is the license:
>> The MIT License (MIT)
Copyright (c) 2015 Max Woolf
Permission is hereby granted [blabla do whatever you want] subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. >>
That copyright notice must be included and it wasn't.
Ass-hattery is often completely orthogonal to this concern. Just because I have the right to do something doesn't mean I should, and it doesn't mean I am not being a jerk by exercising that right it certain contexts.
There are all kinds of interesting claims you can make: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1202
That's ignoring any interesting state law torts.
(Of course, i agree with your general point that you shouldn't need a license to get people to stop doing any of this, but such is society and it has been for thousands of years)
Most communities have some unwritten social rules which participants have to adhere to (or be shunned). The open-source software community is open to anyone on the planet with an internet connection, so it's disingenuous to pretend they will all get along without conflict/misunderstandings.
Separate code/assets/associated content, and license them accordingly.
EDIT: and also IMHO a dick move without talking to him first. Just wanted to remind people that these tools also can work for "normal" people, not just against them.
It doesn't but the person lying about having written the code can still be shamed for it.