Did PieFed 'steal code' from Pylova? Let's look at what happened

[rimu@piefed.social]

This is my first open source project, apart from tiny bits of code that no one ever paid any attention to. Maybe I don’t know how to do open source properly, maybe I made a mistake here. Let’s find out.

[[[global:guest]]]

Dear Piefedadmin/Rimu,

Thank you for the effort, marvel, art, you do...

It makes sense the person got upset, but they indeed did not follow the license, considering the header/annotation missing. You did everything right from the point of the license, and considering your time you invest into the works, it makes also sense to follow the license only.

Yet, indeed, when I work at projects at jobs, or something personal, I do tend to leave references in the code as comments (if it's in the middle; or the header, if it's a start of the entire file); in the commit messages, or least pull-requests, though the latter is weaker considering the vendor custom database outsourced. These also help to track down the origin in the history, in case of required:

> /** @see https://codeberg.org/quokkau/PyLova/src/commit/deb4cb2bb9956019dd5c847de03a28d9b9ed45b5/app/community/routes.py#L1115 */

Yet, sure it may increase the source code much... hence commit messages, CHANGELOG.md, or pull-requests to just have a reference in the history of someone's invaluably marvelous life on the miraculous road!

You sure know how it all works, and this is sure not fair to call it "stealing", and especially with no private clarification prior public judgement, I believe...

You publishing this clarification on public highlights your gratitude, respect, and acknowledgement towards other people's effort even more, of course... and is sparkling appreciated...

Meanwhile, I do wish you, and everyone here, safety, stability, and peace...

Best and kind regards

[fedicat@pc.cafe]

@rimu I took a quick look at pylova and I don't have a good impression from the readme, it's one of those forks that just says we're going to do everything better.

[rimu@piefed.social]

As far as I know their main point of difference is they removed all the antifascist features. Even though they're off by default, lol

[rimu@piefed.social]

Thank you for your kind words.

Coding in public like this is quite vulnerable and does require/assume good-faith engagement from others. There's a huge array of ways to exploit that vulnerability and I've seen many examples of that in the last few months.

It's been really hard.

[hubertmanne@piefed.social]

I don't have an answer but just want to mention im appreciative of the open discussion for those of us who might learn something. From my simplistic knowledge of open source I thought gpl just required providing source and being gpl licensed. I actually though agpl was actually more permissive to be used in propietary software and was mostly supposed to be used with libraries and such.

[jerry@feddit.online]

In mainstream FOSS development, this situation is typically handled with a routine, low-friction interaction where the downstream author opens an issue or leaves a comment on the commit saying:

“Hey, glad you liked the theme! Could you amend the commit to include Co-authored-by: or cherry-pick the original commit so the git history reflects the author?”

The Typical Resolution: The maintainer amends the commit, adds a note to the changelog/commit message, and both projects move on.

The immature way is to accuse the downstream developer of stealing.

[openstars@discuss.online]

I don't understand even a tenth of this - e.g. I don't know what AGPL is, and if someone can make a fork of your code then it makes sense that you can fork the downstream changes too (or not "fork" but... whatever it's called edit: reuse with attribution) - but I just wanted to say thank you for contributing code that we all can use.

You, along with Dessalines, Nutomic, Ernst of Kbin, Jgrim of Sublinks, etc. have all provided alternatives to the immensely enshittified for-profit platforms, which is something really special. So thank you.

[artyom@piefed.social]

AGPL is the standard FOSS license that allows others to copy the code and use it for whatever purpose they wish, with some restrictions, like they can't use the name or branding and they must republish their own source code under the same license.

[grail@multiverse.soulism.net]

PyLova's AGPL license displays the copyright notice for PieFed, including claiming the program as copyright by Rimu Atkinson. Rimu, I think legally speaking, you stole your own code from yourself. 😂

[blueether@no.lastname.nz]

Many years ago I was building ROMs for one of the Sony lines of phones on XDA. I saw an interesting feature that had been ported form another Sony line into yet another line. I grabbed the code (only have this guys copyright no GPL mentioned), found the original Sony code (GPL'd) brought it in and attributed both Sony and the porter. I tagged the author of that code in my post on XDA and they lost their shit very publicly that I stole their code - even though it was GPL'd in the Sony repo and they had not kept the GPL intact.

Even if you fully attribute code, some people still don't get FOSS

[atro_city@fedia.io]

In reality 4chan is a cesspit of the worst people on the internet and a hotbed of fascism.

I think that crown goes to Xitter now. Hopefully there's detection of Xitter screenshots too. Fuck that place.

[warl0k3@lemmy.world]

Oh it's in the running for second place, but 4chan is way, way worse. /b/ is now just nothing but AI goonbait and incitement for a race war.

[atro_city@fedia.io]

4chan has people hiding their identities and being nazi fucks. Xitter has people showing their whole face and location, calling for the death of trans people. Xitter is IMO by far the worst. Screenshots from that place should be banned across the fediverse.

[rimu@piefed.social]

Hahaha I guess so

[rimu@piefed.social]

I have ideas for this. Will let you know if they come to fruition.

[kierunkowy74@piefed.zip]

Former Twitter decayed info today's X. Its microblogging format has been copied by several apparently non-fascist apps, like Bluesky or Mastodon.

4chan is a most known imageboard and detecting posts from it to delete them will have less collateral damage.

[kierunkowy74@piefed.zip]

You have confused it with LGPL (Lesser GPL).
AGPL is meant to force site admins to publish source code also to site visitors (as, technically speaking, only an instance admin is an user of software like PieFed or Mastodon)

[1fuji2taka3nasubi@piefed.zip]

I assume PyLova’s dev were unsatisfied with PieFed that they forked it. Whether the dissatisfaction was with the code or the dev team I don’t know. It may have contributed to their apparently emotional “we are happy to take from you but not happy to let you take from us” response.

That said, sounds like Rimu did not verify with PyLova devs whether the third party conveyed their thoughts accurately. I don’t blame him; it is a task that takes both emotional and physical efforts. Just perhaps it could have been resolved in a more beneficial way to both parties, e.g. they might have been satisfied if attribution are added to the files themselves.

[misk@piefed.social]

It is quite transparent that Quokka affiliated AI boosters are now being surprisingly pedantic about licensing given their other beliefs, which is happening out of spite for being blocked by Piefed.social.