This whole thread is strange to me. Seems like it was two people who focused more on being right or “winning” the argument than actually communicating, trying to understand each other, or sharing with the community. (Why was there even an argument to begin with?) Could have just been a polite ask for proper credit and an update to the repo. Instead it devolved into proving who was right or wrong, and also hinted at an implied urgency and distrust to it all that didn’t make sense.
Maybe it was just bad timing and everyone was already stressed out and having a bad day and being defensive. It’s a shame a petty argument that didn’t even need to be an argument caused a loss for the community. And it’s also a shame that it makes the community look far less welcoming, especially since new projects seem to have slowed down since the new year.
Open source projects are valuable and a powerful driver of progress and better software. But intellectual property is just as important and valuable. This applies both in the direct commercial sphere and in open source projects, where the creators are at least entitled to respect and recognition as authors.
I think it’s very unfortunate when source code appears that is not correctly labeled. From what I’ve observed, that was the only thing jblanked asked for.
I was taught to give respect first, and that’s exactly what I’ve done. I’ve always thanked others for help/support and used my platform to shine light on others too.
What happened to Astro was bullying. The mock/parody forum was rude, mean, and correctly resembles how the community has been acting lately.
I’ve put hundreds of hours into Picoware and all I did was ask for credit, but somehow the same people who bullied Astro are trying to turn this around on me and make me seem like the bad guy for asking for credit.
I agree with you that you were right to point out your authorship. But I don’t see that anyone here meant you any harm.
To Astrox again: Yes, the mockery wasn’t funny for him, but for many others whom Astrox showed little respect for, it was somewhat satisfying. And Astrox had only himself to blame for that.
Overall, I find this forum to be very friendly, open-minded, and helpful.
I read your post along with the others, and I know you did initially ask for credit. I wasn’t trying to place blame on you or Neusse, as from what I read it seemed like both of you were responding to each other and mostly agreeing with each other, but somehow it just kept escalating into an argument.
I wasn’t planning on dissecting this whole thing, because frankly, it’s ridiculous this has even become a “thing”. But…
Maybe that was a bit confrontational and vague. Saying something like “please don’t forget to add credit and a link back to PicoWare in your repo for the code you used” might have made it a bit more clear, but at this point things didn’t look like they were going off the rails.
This response acknowledged and gave credit here, but oddly made no mention of updating the repo to give credit. Maybe it was planned and just wasn’t spelled out here, or maybe it was unclear to them that credit needed to be posted on the repo. Who knows.
Ok, that cleared things up, in terms of expectations. Things still don’t seem to be going off the rails.
Here’s where things quickly start to degenerate into an argument. Not sure why Neusse got defensive. You (jblanked) didn’t directly accuse them of stealing here, but it sounds like that’s what this is a response to. The message ends with:
“I’ll add a clear note in the README and a short header comment in the relevant files along the lines of “inspired by Picoware’s concept/feature set” (and link to the repo), plus any license notices that apply.”
So when I was skimming through, I fully expected that to be the end of it. Sounds like the repo was going to be updated with the acknowledgement and link, so everything would be good. Problem solved, right? Neusse could have been apologetic about his use of PicoWare code without attribution, but the plan was to provide that attribution so I’m not sure what else was really expected here.
Everything after this point seemed like argument for the sake of argument to me. I’m not sure exactly when Neusse was planning to update their repo, but there didn’t seem to be any time allowed for that to happen since the messages on here seemed to take priority. Maybe I’m completely off base here, and it’s not really any of my business anyway (though I do care about the community here not becoming toxic, as Clockwork does a pretty good job of discouraging the community by making the devices so hard to get!), but I just saw this as a communication breakdown or misunderstanding.
I agree with you here. I didn’t even like the milder bullying that kept popping up in the Astro thread(s) but when the parody thread was created that made it clear the goal was just to be mean instead of trying to either help or educate. It was also just a useless waste of space on the forum, though I’d almost rather see spammy joke meme image threads than threads that are mean. If Clockwork actually had mods that kept up with posts on this forum rather than mostly relying on automod stuff, that parody thread should have been flagged and removed as soon as it was posted. And really, a mod should have sent a (polite) private message to Astralixi long before that. It might have prevented the multiple Astro threads and maybe even lessened the repetitive posts that encouraged new, well meaning forum members to respond with useful information and then realize it was mostly for naught. And to be fair, while Astralixi wasn’t capable of using much of that information, there was still a lot of useful information posted in response, which someone else might find useful. These are public forums, so when good, useful stuff is posted others might benefit, and when people are just being jackasses, then everyone will see it and will have to decide if they want to continue to even come here or not.
I haven’t followed too closely, but it seems like Astralixi found a place to help in the Calculinux project, and has been doing documentation stuff for them. So maybe that enthusiasm won’t go to waste. In any case, it found like they found something they can actually contribute to.
i ask for credit when my code gets used too, but i don’t do this, as jblanked did, by harassing someone with an inflammatory issue in their GitHub repository FUD-ly titled “DMCA” implying it’s a takedown complaint (without an actual DMCA document which suggests to me that jblanked doesn’t actually know what a DMCA request entails, meanwhile i have actually had to file one of those once long ago)
I feel like this is just a series of misunderstandings.
I never accused you of not giving credit to an author. I also told jblanked that I didn’t think anyone meant him any harm. I just understand that he gets annoyed when he finds pieces of his code without a reference.
another misunderstanding is that i wanted to imply anyone implied i, maple, don’t give credit i was just giving a preamble to the sentence that followed it
i’ve edited the wording in that post to try to make my point clearer.
If you look at the source code in question there is not a proper header decaling ownership of the code licensing and what name should be attributed. This makes it difficult to keep track and attribute. And if you look deeper there are only some attributions to the upstream code in picoware no header stating ownership and modification and license and a name to attribute credit to.
Here is an example from the most contested code picoware_keyboard.c:
// Define STATIC if not already defined (MicroPython macro)
this is the first 10 limes.
I mentioned that without this my project would not exist. But looking at the code I have no clue what is expected. or what License it requires. That’s why you see a banner in all professional code.
This file creates bindings to the actual driver keyboard.c written by someone else with no attestation in the header. here is a link to the authors code.
If you want credit help us give you credit by adding a proper header to your code.
Yes that’s from the PicoCalc-text-starter project. That one I should have done better and my other repos I do better with annotating the source files.
I think I might have privately(!) bugged @jblanked about attribution to my work.
Honestly, I built that starter as a jumping point for people to get started and create great things on the PicoCalc that I can to play with. So I’m happy with getting fun things.
Since @jblanked posted a public vid on YouTube, I made a comment there that I will repeat here for completeness:
What @jblanked doesn’t mention is that he took my code without attribution in Picoware, but the big difference is that I talked to @jblanked in private, not in public, and we had it sorted in no time.
i was just giving a preamble to the sentence that followed it
