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There are a lot of reasons someone might clone your repo. Personally, I've frequently cloned repos to read and play around with the code. Making changes to the

There are a lot of reasons someone might clone your repo. Personally, I've frequently cloned repos to read and play around with the code. Making changes to the code is a good way for me to verify that I understand what's going on: if a change does what I expect it to do, then it means I probably understood the code. In that case, I don't really care if I miss updates. As for people not knowing what the real repository is: there's not really a such thing as the "real" repo. Git just isn't centralized like that. Probably since you are the original coder, yours will be the most popular, but if you're worried about not getting credit for your work, there are a few things you can do: 1. As viraptor said, you can put a link to your repo in the README. 2. It's a good idea to put a LICENSE file in your repo. You can choose one which requires people to give you credit. Keep in mind that you can't force people to pull your code with these changes, and if they've already cloned it they have it under the original license (which may be no license at all). So this doesn't really fix the problem you have now, it only prevents more people from cloning w/o a link back in the future.

justincormack 11y ago
If you haven't specified a license they have no legal right to use the code, not a completely liberal license. It is against github's terms to have public closed source code so arguably they have an implicit open license but they can't choose which one.
- nadams 11y ago
  > If you haven't specified a license they have no legal right to use the code This is technically correct - however according to the github TOS [1] [2] you agree to allow people to view and fork your code. But - what is stopping me from creating a new algorithm that is X% faster than what is out there - uploading it to some service or site without a license and suing everyone who uses it? I have a feeling that someone would have done that by now. Obviously in the US we have fair use for certain circumstances, but also I feel like if you attribute it to the author then that is fine. Otherwise every public school is forcing the students to break the law by making them use content from encyclopedias, research papers, and other online sources that don't have an explicit license. At least when I went to school - copying content from work that was not explicitly licensed was deemed ok as long as you cited it with MLA, APA, or whatever 3 letter format was popular at the time. However - mixing unlicensed code with licensed code could lead to a disastrous situation (unless you stated in the LICENSE file that a chunk of code is not under the overall license). [1] https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of-service/ https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of-service/ [2] http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/207941/reusing-open-source-code-that-doesn-t-specify-a-license http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/207941/reusin...
  - adrusi 11y ago
    You're conflating the idea of copyright violation and plagiarism. Copyright violoation is violating someone's exclusive right to control a piece of original content. Plagiarism is claiming someone else's ideas as your own. Ideas are not protected by intellectual property law, although plagiarism is usually also fraud. You can avoid commiting plagiarism by adding a citation. A citation basically states "These ideas were not originally mine, I got them from so-and-so". You're usually not going to want to reproduce so much of a work in your research that copyright law would come into play (you can legally paste a few sentences from a book on your blog IANAL). Often though a research paper fits into a category protected by fair use so you can anyway. But you can't reproduce and distribute an entire piece of copyright protected work just by providing a citation. I hope you haven't done this. If you have, you should take everything down. Do not apologize to the copyright holder. Talk to a lawyer.
    - nadams 11y ago
      > You're usually not going to want to reproduce so much of a work in your research that copyright law would come into play (you can legally paste a few sentences from a book on your blog IANAL). The content of the encyclopedia is still copyrighted material of the company - copyright law is always in effect. Also - when writing a program it would most likely be composed of different projects. I would find it very unlikely that you aren't using a library or piece of code that is copyrighted or licensed by someone else. > Often though a research paper fits into a category protected by fair use so you can anyway. You could still apply fair use for code - and if your derivative work is for non-commercial use then it would be hard to argue a copyright violation [1]. Especially if you tried to contact the author and didn't get a response. > But you can't reproduce and distribute an entire piece of copyright protected work just by providing a citation. I never said you could? > I hope you haven't done this. If you have, you should take everything down. I never said I did? You didn't express the big picture problem - if I release some unlicensed code into the wild and people start using it - does that give me the right to sue everyone on the planet? [1] http://ogc.harvard.edu/pages/copyright-and-fair-use http://ogc.harvard.edu/pages/copyright-and-fair-use [2] http://smallbusiness.findlaw.com/intellectual-property/fair-use-law.html http://smallbusiness.findlaw.com/intellectual-property/fair-...
luck87 11y ago
Yes, I have just both. The GitHub users are friendly and I have never problems about license. I am only pretty scared about updates (10 cloned repositories), but your reply seems reasonable: yours will be the most popular. On the other hand, I have also cloned projects to learn and improve myself :-)

justincormack 11y ago

If you haven't specified a license they have no legal right to use the code, not a completely liberal license. It is against github's terms to have public closed source code so arguably they have an implicit open license but they can't choose which one.

nadams 11y ago
> If you haven't specified a license they have no legal right to use the code This is technically correct - however according to the github TOS [1] [2] you agree to allow people to view and fork your code. But - what is stopping me from creating a new algorithm that is X% faster than what is out there - uploading it to some service or site without a license and suing everyone who uses it? I have a feeling that someone would have done that by now. Obviously in the US we have fair use for certain circumstances, but also I feel like if you attribute it to the author then that is fine. Otherwise every public school is forcing the students to break the law by making them use content from encyclopedias, research papers, and other online sources that don't have an explicit license. At least when I went to school - copying content from work that was not explicitly licensed was deemed ok as long as you cited it with MLA, APA, or whatever 3 letter format was popular at the time. However - mixing unlicensed code with licensed code could lead to a disastrous situation (unless you stated in the LICENSE file that a chunk of code is not under the overall license). [1] https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of-service/ https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of-service/ [2] http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/207941/reusing-open-source-code-that-doesn-t-specify-a-license http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/207941/reusin...
- adrusi 11y ago
  You're conflating the idea of copyright violation and plagiarism. Copyright violoation is violating someone's exclusive right to control a piece of original content. Plagiarism is claiming someone else's ideas as your own. Ideas are not protected by intellectual property law, although plagiarism is usually also fraud. You can avoid commiting plagiarism by adding a citation. A citation basically states "These ideas were not originally mine, I got them from so-and-so". You're usually not going to want to reproduce so much of a work in your research that copyright law would come into play (you can legally paste a few sentences from a book on your blog IANAL). Often though a research paper fits into a category protected by fair use so you can anyway. But you can't reproduce and distribute an entire piece of copyright protected work just by providing a citation. I hope you haven't done this. If you have, you should take everything down. Do not apologize to the copyright holder. Talk to a lawyer.
  - nadams 11y ago
    > You're usually not going to want to reproduce so much of a work in your research that copyright law would come into play (you can legally paste a few sentences from a book on your blog IANAL). The content of the encyclopedia is still copyrighted material of the company - copyright law is always in effect. Also - when writing a program it would most likely be composed of different projects. I would find it very unlikely that you aren't using a library or piece of code that is copyrighted or licensed by someone else. > Often though a research paper fits into a category protected by fair use so you can anyway. You could still apply fair use for code - and if your derivative work is for non-commercial use then it would be hard to argue a copyright violation [1]. Especially if you tried to contact the author and didn't get a response. > But you can't reproduce and distribute an entire piece of copyright protected work just by providing a citation. I never said you could? > I hope you haven't done this. If you have, you should take everything down. I never said I did? You didn't express the big picture problem - if I release some unlicensed code into the wild and people start using it - does that give me the right to sue everyone on the planet? [1] http://ogc.harvard.edu/pages/copyright-and-fair-use http://ogc.harvard.edu/pages/copyright-and-fair-use [2] http://smallbusiness.findlaw.com/intellectual-property/fair-use-law.html http://smallbusiness.findlaw.com/intellectual-property/fair-...

luck87 11y ago

Yes, I have just both. The GitHub users are friendly and I have never problems about license. I am only pretty scared about updates (10 cloned repositories), but your reply seems reasonable: yours will be the most popular. On the other hand, I have also cloned projects to learn and improve myself :-)