alt Hacker NewsYou can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the actual claim was that Zigbook had not complied with the MIT license's attribution clause for code someone believed was copied. MIT only requires attribution for copies of "substantial portions" of code, and the code copied was 22 lines.
Does that count as substantial? I'm not sure because I'm not a lawyer, but this was really an issue about definitions in an attribution clause over less code than people regularly copy from stack overflow without a second thought. By the time this accusation was made, the Zigbook author was already under attack from the community which put them in a defensive posture.
Now, just to be clear, I think the book author behaved poorly in response. But the internet is full of young software engineers who would behave poorly if they wrote a book for a community and the community turned around and vilified them for it. I try not to judge individuals by the way they behave on their worst days. But I do think something like a community has a behavior and culture of its own and that does need to be guided with intention.
> You can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the actual claim was that Zigbook had not complied with the MIT license's attribution clause for code someone believed was copied. MIT only requires attribution for copies of "substantial portions" of code, and the code copied was 22 lines.
Without including proper credit, it is classic infringement. I wouldn't personally call copyright infringement "theft", though.
Imagine for a moment, the generosity of the MIT license: 'you can pretty much do anything you want with this code, I gift it to the world, all you have to do is give proper credit'. And so you read that, and take and take and take, and can't even give credit.
> Now, just to be clear, I think the book author behaved poorly in response
Precisely: maybe it was just a mistake? So, the author politely and professionally asks, not for the infringer to stop using the author's code, but just to give proper credit. And hey, here's a PR, so doing the right thing just requires an approval!
The infringer's response to the offer of help seemed to confirm that this was not a mistake, but rather someone acting in bad faith. IMO, people should learn early on in their life to say "I was wrong, I'm sorry, I'll make it right, it won't happen again". Say that when you're wrong, and the respect floods in.
> By the time this accusation was made, the Zigbook author was already under attack
This is not quite accurate, from my recollection of events (which could be mistaken!): the community didn't even know about it until after the author respectfully, directly contacted the infringer with an offer to help, and the infringer responded with hostility and what looked like a case of Oppositional Defiant Disorder.