OMG! Someone Stole My Code

7 commentsWritten on January 12th, 2010 by
Categories: Opinions

I received an email from someone who wanted to let me know that she noticed that a coworker of her used all of the code from my Build Your Own Data Access Layer Series in their project without any notice of where it actually came from. The code in that series was posted using the Creative Commons Attribution license which only states one simple condition:

You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).

First of all, i don't really get what this person was trying to achieve by notifying me of this. What am i going to do about it? Ask them to add a notice? Should i even care about it? I don't, actually. If anything, i'm glad they're using it and i just hope that it works for them and that they don't run into any issues with it. If i didn't want people using it, i shouldn't have posted it. And as for adding a notice... that would be nice, but it's not going to make any difference for me whether they do or don't.

I think it's different when you release code as an open source project. Then i obviously do want people to respect the license, but for blog code i don't really care what people do with it. I did mention a license in the original post, but that's pretty much only because some people don't want to use it if there is no license mentioned. Which is correct, theoretically. But the vast majority of code that i list on this blog never has a mention of a specific license. It's just too much of a bother IMO, and there isn't anything that i can realistically do about it if people use it without respecting the license anyway.

So for future reference: feel free to do whatever you want with any code that i post on this blog, unless of course that code comes from an open source project. Would it be legal? No. Am i going to do something about it? No.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 12th, 2010 at 22:06 and is filed under Opinions. You can subscribe to any comments to this entry via RSS 2.0. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • http://irwinj.blogspot.com Jason

    I feel bad for the person that contacted you – she was clearly trying to help and you sided with the person who stole your code. I know, you don’t care about the license on blogged code but at the end of the day she was trying to be helpful and did not have access to the feelings which you just made explicit or your justification for including a license.

  • http://dnagir.blogspot.com Dmitriy Nagirnyak

    I wouldn’t ever wanted to work with a person who “reports” co-workers to the “Authority”.
    Not that I disrespect the licensing and stuff, but it is just about the trust within the team.
    She hadn’t even bother to read Creative-Commons license.
    In any case they had to solve the licensing “issue” inside the team and not throw bricks at each other.

    The atmosphere in that team is probably very untruthful, unhealthy; last stage of cancer.

    Why can’t people just respect each other and stop freaking talks behind the back…

  • http://davybrion.com Davy Brion

    @Jason

    i replied to her email before i wrote this post, stating pretty much the same thing. I did thank her for the notification, and she already let me know that she understands now why i don’t really care about it.

  • http://twitter.com/zsepi Peter Zsoldos

    Licensing/copyrights/copylefts aside, it would be beneficial for maintainers/new developers to have a link to the documentation (blog posts) of the DAL.

  • Michael Kjörling

    Agreed with #4 Peter Zsoldos.

    Also, if those are terms you are comfortable with, you may want to look into using the CC0 license in the future. http://creativecommons.org/choose/zero

  • Peter F.

    To your point about OSS projects, some IT departments have inane rules about allowing open-source projects to be used within their code. I’ve seen entire OS libraries snuck in by repackaging the code as part of some internally developed “Shared” library. Clearly, this is foolish on so many fronts:

    1) now there are two maintenance branches and it’s unlikely the shadow copy will keep up with the OS project changes
    2) all the documentation and supporting community are left out (developers need to know about the actual library (“our ORM, wink wink…”)
    3) large code-bases are intimidating and hard to grok, it’s so much easier to teach concepts and APIs
    4) it creates a liability for the company
    5) most developers don’t want to “steal” the code! they just want to reuse an existing library, not feel like thieves
    6) from a management perspective, the average code-quality of mature OSS vs in-house is heavily weighted in favor of OSS

    But it’s a reality. The cases where a developer wants to pass off other people’s code as their own are in a different category.

    Love the blog, btw.

    P.S.

    heh, the reCAPTCHA for this post was “debutante found” — found where?

  • http://www.everybodysafe.com kurt schroeder

    I wish more people would steal my code. Then i’d feel like i was doing something right more of the time. I would love to have it reported by a concerned other too so i could put it on my resume as a noted achevement! May, 2010: My REST example was stolen by ***** ***** and is currently being used in a comercial site. That’s future, because i’m learning REST meaning i’m the one who is stealing, but i do make note of it in just those terms. Code stolen from (by permission) ***** ******!

    I appreicated the person who reported the theft and can understand a certain anoyance with others who do not note where the idea came from. Giving credit where it is due is more than just courtisy, but I really feel that’s a good enough reason. Giving credit will let others know where they may find good other ideas. It can be disheartening to some when another takes credit for an idea they had a hand in, but at a certain point yo just have to allow the public free access. In the film Michael, staring John Travolta, The beer drinking cigerette smoking angel said one day, (paraphrase) “see that, those people are standing in line. You know, I invented that!” (what did they do before?) “…they just stood round.” I mean someone has to be first, right?

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