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Comment by menaerus | Hacker News Reader

Can you give an example what exactly was copied? I ask because I took a look into MR and original repo, and the conclusion is that the tool only copy-pasted the copyright header but not the code. So I am still wondering - what's wrong with that (it's a silly mistake even a human can make), and where is the copyright infringement everyone is talking about?

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> copy-past[ing] the copyright header but not the code [is] a silly mistake even a human can make

Do you mind showing me some examples of that? That seems so implausible to me

Just for reference, here's another example of AI adding phantom contributors and the human just ignoring it or not even noticing: https://github.com/auth0/nextjs-auth0/issues/2432

> Do you mind showing me some examples of that? That seems so implausible to me

What's so special about it that I need to show you the example?

You are claiming humans copy-and-paste copyright headers without copying the corresponding code. To prove you're correct, you only need to show one (or a few) examples of it happening. To prove you incorrect, someone would have to go through all code in existence to show the absence of the phenomenon.

Hence the burden of proof is on you.

No code besides the header was copied so I am asking what is so problematic about it?

that was already explained before

Oh wow. That's just egregious. Considering the widespread use of Auth0, I'm surprised this isn't a bigger story.

None of that matters. The header is there, in writing, and discussed in the PR. It is acknowledged by both parties and the author gives a clumsy response for its existence. The PR is simply tainted by this alone, not to mention other pain points.

You may not consider this problematic. But maintainers of this project sure do, given this was one of the immediate concerns of theirs.

OxCaml is a fork of OCaml, they have the same license.

I wasn't able to find any chunks of code copied wholesale from OxCaml which already has a DWARF implementation.

All that code wasn't written by Mark, AI just decided to paste his copyright all over.

It matters because it completely weakens their point of stance and make them look unreasonable. Header is irrelevant since it isn't copyright infringement, and FWIW when it has been corrected (in the MR), then they decided that the MR is too complex for them and closed the whole issue. Ridiculous.

An incorrect copyright header is a major red flag for non technical reasons. If you think it is an irrelevant minor matter then you do not undesirable several very important social and legal aspects of the issue.

Social maybe yes what legal aspects? Everybody keeps repeating that but there is no copyright infringement. Maybe you can point me to one?

I understand that people are uncomfortable with this, I am likely too, but objectively looking there's technically nothing wrong or different to what humans already do.

The point is that it ended up in the PR in the first place. The submitted seemed unaware of its presence and only looked into it after it was pointed out. This is sloppy and is a major red flag.

So there's no point? Sloppy maybe yes but technically incorrect or legally questionable no. Struggle is real

If the submitter is sloppy with things that are not complicated, how can one be sure of things that ARE complicated?

The funny thing is that it works, have a look at the MR. It says:

  All existing tests pass. Additional DWARF tests verify:

  DWARF structure (DW_TAG_compile_unit, DW_TAG_subprogram).
  Breakpoints by function and line in both GDB and LLDB.
  Type information and variable visibility.
  Correct multi-object linking.
  Platform-specific relocation handling.

So the burden of proof is obviously not anymore on the MR submitter side but the other.

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