Licensing and giving authorship credit

Quote from: banzai at Mar 25, 2006, 12:58 PM

Quote from: ScottyDelicious at Mar 25, 2006, 12:04 AM

As far as I know, MiniGallery has never played nice with friendly alias paths, in any of it’s incarnations. This is not new, and it is obviously not addressed in this revision of MiniGallery. I don’t use FAP’s, so I didn’t even look into correcting it.

later

-sD-

right it’s an old eto snippet

Right, unacknowledged and out of date. I’m disappointed by the number of people here using snippets from elsewhere, unacknowledged, and presumably aiming to take credit for the work done by others.

Mike, I don’t think anyone is trying to pass off other people’s work as their own. At least I really hope they’re not! If they are then shame on them and that really won’t be tolerated by any means.

Anything that was based off work originally at Eto should without question be credited properly, and has been in any core code that’s been distributed. In fact, even the ideas remain as credits long after the code has been rewritten. Unfortunately there’s a lot of activity here so there is a chance that something has slipped through unnoticed.

Please feel free to bring any questionable code to our attention via PM, and we’ll see to it that the proper credits are either added or the offending code in question is removed from this site. Thanks for bringing up a really valid point.

Quote from: mikef at Apr 09, 2006, 08:20 PM

right it’s an old eto snippet

Right, unacknowledged and out of date. I’m disappointed by the number of people here using snippets from elsewhere, unacknowledged, and presumably aiming to take credit for the work done by others.

Yo! Mikey...
Look at the first three lines of the damn snippet.
maybe get your shit together and know your facts before you run your mouth off.
Mad props to Hugelmopf for the original snippet AND giving his blessing to the MODx version.
I suggest in the future you relax until you understand what you are talking about!

Kind regards,

-sD-
scottyDelicious

My recollection is that when the initial minigallery snippet was created no attempt was made to contact hugelmopf. He and I discussed it at the time, as it was a fairly close copy. If this has since been cleared up with Hugelmopf I apologise for raising it again.

Quote from: mikef at Apr 10, 2006, 12:19 AM

My recollection is that when the initial minigallery snippet was created no attempt was made to contact hugelmopf. He and I discussed it at the time, as it was a fairly close copy. If this has since been cleared up with Hugelmopf I apologise for raising it again.

OK, I have a question. Being fairly new to the world of open source development, when a person decides they would like to take an existing piece of code, application, snippet, etc. and modify it from the original, is it not cool to do so unless you contact the original author first? Is it not enough to clearly acknowledge the source? Is the answer "it depends on how much of a departure it is from the original?" Does everyone who wants to create a new Linux distro ask for Linus Torvald’s blessing before doing so? I would like to know if there is some generally accepted protocol regarding this issue.

Now, I’m not talking about any particular snippet or any other specific piece of code here, so I’m not interested in what has or has not happened in the development of MiniGallery (or MaxiGallery, where mikef has raised the same issues). I’m just asking an honest question about the principle involved here. Thanks.

LOL... wow... Huge can of worms there.

Here’s how I’m going to see that MODx operates, despite what is either the letter or the spirit of the law mandates: Treat everyone (and the project and inspirations) like you like to be treated.

That means give people their fair credit for their ideas. Be respectful and courteous. Don’t fly off the handle and make ludicrous, rude, embittered and inaccurate assertions unless you were a party to what actually transpired. There’s noted potential for this discussion to denigrate into a childish turf war with plenty of name calling, but that benefits no one.

For reference – and as I understand it – the letter of the law is that once a product is GPL’d you’re free to do whatever you wish with it as long as you publish the source code if you distribute the code. (Note: please let’s not let this turn into a discussion of the nuances of the GPL as that’s been beaten to death ad nauseam elsewhere. 9000 times over by folks a lot smarter than me.)

MODx is an open source project which means people will inevitably "borrow"... I encourage it honestly, especially if we start not doing what the community wants. It either will keep us on our toes and innovative, or will give an outlet for our growing community to continue down the appropriate path. Even if we do what people want, people will still borrow or hide its source, and I’m OK with that too. Just please don’t complain to me if it breaks, ask me to support it, or otherwise continue taking without reciprocation or clear credit of original authorship.

Etomite was truly original and Raymond and I saw a ton of potential in it and wanted to play a role in its future. We’ve never once remotely tried to hide that fact. Regardless of the true reasons, it didn’t work out that MODx continued under the auspices of that community. Rather than see it die, we created this community and have continued to refine and rewrite the code with a ton of help from a lot of really great folks, both from an Eto-background and from other projects and skill areas.

And like Ralph , I harbor no ill will towards Etomite. I am thankful for its inspiration, as its been a key part of making MODx what it is today. There’s no real reason to discuss it further honestly. Bygones.

Now, back on topic folks! LOL

Wow....
Ever since I’m gone for a few days, a lot of interesting discussion had happened in this forum.

I’m not one of those Open Source evangelist out there that knows a lot about the culture, regulation, history and etc about Open Source, but I do believe that each authors has the rights to claim the right license for the code.

So Mikef, you’ve been raising quite a few licensing issue about using the old eto resources, and this might be a good idea for us to start reviewing the original license for the code. I don’t know about the licensing for MiniGallery, and I’m not planning to do so, butif it’s licensed under GPL, there is no reason for some of us not to take the code and release it without contacting the author, as long as we leave the right credits, give a full source code for the snippet. So maybe Mark or scotty can research more on this. If it’s being licensed not under any open source license, please correct us, but I do believe that all the users/members in here know about the importance in giving a proper credits for the author. If that’s not enough, I believe we can discuss this further with the author or any representative to represent the author.

PS: I’m a coder and I don’t like seeing my code being used without my acknowledgement, but by the time I release something as an open source project, I do understand that 75% will give a proper credit to my original code, and 25% won’t, and it’s part of the sacrifice that I make to the open source community. So if we talk about credits and etc, I believe all the core coders in here do understand this really well, coz we’ve been working day and night in coding this usefull resources or core code without being paid at all, so credits is one of the things that can keep us going. No one can understand this better than us coder for this open source system. So you don’t have to worry, because we won’t take someone else credits for our own glory.

(This remind me of some other complaints about the SMF copyright. It seems to me that more people are suspecting us for not keeping a proper credits to the original author of the scripts that we use. Do we need to make a special section in our website to explain it further Ryan, maybe a blog about this will be perfect? Something to let the original authors to contact us if they thing we violate the way we give credits to their work, hopefully with this, there will be no further issue regarding about credits and etc in this forum )

LOL... Wendy, if only browsers supported the blink tag still I’d be tempted to use it...

The way I understand the open source GPL is that you are free to use code bit xyz so long as you release it under the same license, credit the origional author, and provide the entire source code. I don’t believe that it states anywhere that you must notify the author, although doing so is a good idea.

Quote from: rthrash at Apr 10, 2006, 04:51 AM

LOL... Wendy, if only browsers supported the blink tag still I’d be tempted to use it...

That’s a really good idea though Hehehe... Oh btw, what is the last browser that still support this tag, IE 6 maybe?

@Mark: Contacting the author might be a good idea though. I keep make that as a habit, every time I want to use someone else script. But under any circumstances, it’s not 100% do able, in fact, from 2 out of 3 authors that I contacted, they never replied to my email, lol But anyway, mikef makes his point here, and we do have our point as well, so whicever it is, as long as we can satisfied both parties, lets do it