I think you should see something.
Like I mentioned many time before, this isn't my first attempt at creating an aggregator. Years ago, I built something similar, and back then I drew a lot of inspiration from Postmill. This time, to avoid starting from scratch, I get some elements from my old snippets. Originally, kbin was meant to be a project just for me and a few friends, so I didn't attribute the origin authors. That's not an excuse, though — I should have done it right away when the project became public on git. I have a point in my roadmap called "Preparing a repository for contributors," where I allocated a significant amount of time to educate myself about licenses, attributions, and so on. Unfortunately, everything unfolded in the wrong order.
https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/196
I think Emma is right. Since I share my small successes with you, I also want to be transparent about my failures and mistakes. I will push the proper attributions to the repository today along with some critical fixes.
To avoid reinventing the wheel, I took some code used in federation from Pixelfed as well. Essentially, there are two projects two projects will be marked. However, I have never concealed this fact:
I mean that I'm not a guy who wants to steal your code. It's obvious that someone will take a look at the code of a project that is very similar to theirs. Sometimes, I just become terribly messy when I have to do many things at once. This lesson will definitely teach me to prioritize tasks better.
In the end, I can only promise that once everything settles down and I manage to extract a library for ActivityPub, I will revisit the Postmill repository, this time with a pull request proposal.
You should definitely check it out.
https://postmill.xyz/ - Project page
https://raddle.me/ - Postmill instance
https://pixelfed.org/ - Of course, everyone here is familiar with this one ;)
PS. the website should be running a bit faster. I will talk about it next time.
For real, the person's name is LitigousEmma. This is one step away from a copyright troll, which imo seems to the the mortal enemy of the idea of FOSS. Did this Emma recognize all the developers of the programming languages they used, or the people who made the computer they worked on, or the pioneers of electronics in general? It's not like Emma took quarks and atoms and turned it into an web aggregator.
In LitigousEmma's defense, kbin did not comply with the license terms of the open source software, so there is a valid concern here. Unlike most programming languages which are often released under licenses which do not requite attribution.
However, mistakes happen. The open source community is better off if we could all just start from 0 and escalate based on response.
Honestly that's my only issue with this. Ernest was totally rightfully called out for this, as he should have been. But Emma's knee jerk reaction is just a real bad look. Don't make any attempt to reach out and figure out why it's in there. Immediately make a public post accusing him of stealing code, trying to hide that he stole it, and claim it as his own...on a FOSS project no less...
Surely there's a step or 2 before that point..
Some good points but a counter point to consider.
Whether it’s a photo used without permission by a big company or people using your work without attribution there does tend to be a dismissive attitude overall (not that that is the case here)
I can see how somebody could come into this situation with that as the background and just cut right to the chase.
There wasn’t a “cease and desist” (the legal equivalent of an ahem) nor a DMCA copyright takedown (harsher but less financial damaging than a copyright suit with damages)
Their tone was scolding but it was a “hey… heads up… you gotta fix this” without resorting to any of the above.
Ernest took it with the right attitude and Emma accepted it and that’s that.
Couldn’t really ask for a better outcome and Emma has every right to come out swinging harder than she did.
I can’t speak to her experience with this but personally it is sometimes better to be firm (but fair) at the outset so people don’t ignore a softer tone requiring you to escalate it.
That’s just bad for everybody all around.