Is taking someone's code, be it small, and deliberately removing the attribution; an error?
It was fixed and nobody was harmed.
The outrage in GH issues is ridiculous.
Their marketing comes with weird "trust us" vibe and the German tech scene went through these conversations already with the concept of the official app.
Add to that their attempts at transparency which are often a little too late and vague, and you have internet outrage. (With this release for example people were expecting to see server-side code, not that of the Android app everybody could already find in the apk).
Apart from that the official (indeed publicly funded) Corona-Warn-App did a much better job at this. (They actually did follow all the recent best practices in software-develoment + it's (mostly) run as a free software project, taking community contributions seriously, reacting to feedback and issues, etc.)
Because everyone here is a coder and puts a lot of effort into their work, and doesn't want it get stolen.
We put a lot of effort into the Open Source projects we publish. Some of us are very generous and publish things to the public domain, but most of us at least want attribution for our work.
If you copy & paste code, strip the license, claim it's your code, and sell it for money, we consider you the scum of the earth. That's just not something that decent people do.
It could be an error; a junior dev may not know that just copy/pasting code from google search results is generally not allowed. But it's really something that everyone in our profession should know.
Just like a musician is expected to know that they need clearance for samples, or journalists know they need permission for publishing a photo, a programmer is expected to know that they need a license for reusing other people's code.
Meh - I'd speculate it's a result of an underpaid coder with too much work - I've seen these kinds of projects before - people with connections in the public sector get the contract and then basically hire the lowest cost developers available.
> Just like a musician is expected to know that they need clearance for samples, or journalists know they need permission for publishing a photo, a programmer is expected to know that they need a license for reusing other people's code.
And yet those get violated all the time, even in big time publications and by big time artists.
I'm not defending the guy who did it - he did something wrong, but they corrected it and malice attributed to project seems misplaced.
On the flip side I think this could be handled better industry wide - like we already have security vulnerability scanning tools bundled with major code hosting platforms, they should probably figure out a way to do copyright infringement warnings .
If I had copied Culture4Life's code and used it in my own project, they would be suing for tens of thousands of dollars in damages; and the law would agree that I should have to pay tens of thousands of dollars in damages for that infringement. Asking for attribution and a proper license declaration is the polite way to handle a license violation.