alt Hacker NewsThis feels somewhat hypocritical coming from Addy.
Addy Osmani plagiarized my code and 'apologized' years later by publishing an article on his website[1] that he has never linked to from his social media accounts.
I cannot accept his apology until he actually syndicates it with his followers.
Seems relevant to note this behavior in light of points "6. Your code doesn’t advocate for you. People do.", "7. The best code is the code you never had to write.", and "14. If you win every debate, you’re probably accumulating silent resistance."
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Not to make excuses for plagiarism, I am looking at the code itself and somewhat scratching my head since it seems quite...trivial?
I don't mean to belittle the effort but at least in terms of volume of code and level of effort, I wouldn't recognize it as mine if someone had copied it from my work and passed it off as theirs.
Regarding the charge of plagiarism, is it possible that the PR attribution reflects someone eager to contribute something to a larger effort as opposed to simply trying to "steal" someone else's work?
One could reasonably interpret the PR and attribution as "I integrated this code into this project thus I am taking credit for it". In other words there is probably a stronger charge for misguided clout-chasing than plagiarisms.
That code from your post is fairly standard image load handling, but the notable part is this line:
self.apng_supported = ctx.getImageData(0, 0, 1, 1).data[3] === 0;
Unless I'm misunderstanding, it's basically a "neat trick", like using ~~ for rounding or a fast inverse square root.
Is the intent that everyone who makes use of that trick is supposed to link back to your blog?
addy rubs me the wrong way more often than not, but you really gotta let this go friend.
Jesus, bro.
Let bygones be bygones. How long is this ago? It's just code. And what the code did, is not even fundamental. It's not like you cured cancer.
15 years on that trivial piece of code man. Reminds me of Dostoyevsky's "Notes from Underground".
Plagiarizing code is kind of a redundant concept nowadays in the era of LLM coding engines. It's a safe bet there's always copilot plagiarizing someone's code on one of its users' machines, both being oblivious to it.
Thanks for sharing, I found the blogpost hypocritical even without knowing about this
"i cannot accept this apology unless.."
you got a written apology already, what else do you want?
a post of this in all of his socmed accounts? him telling this story to his kids at dinner table and bedtime stories? at his eulogy, obituary, and his grave?
what's your life mission now, to post this little drama of yours on each and every content he puts out?
was that code your best achievement to date? did it stole millions from you and ruined your life?
grow the fuck up dude
You posted the code to a public blog page, with no attribution in the code or request of attribution from others, no license, and seemingly intended to share it freely with the world.
Then you got an apology, and a second apology.
I'm confused about what you think you're owed?
The explanation makes perfect sense, the headers were obviously just copied with no malicious intent. What is it that is still bothering you about this?