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> I saw no mention of Max Woolf, minimaxir, or any mention of the original visualization by the post author. I agree that it is good practice to show attributi

> I saw no mention of Max Woolf, minimaxir, or any mention of the original visualization by the post author. I agree that it is good practice to show attribution, and not directly lie saying you wrote something yourself. However the MIT license doesn't require that. There are a lot of open source licenses that give more protections to the original author. I have a theory that too many people choose MIT just because it is simple, but don't think through what they actually want from a license.

lexicalscope 11y ago
I think that's his point - he doesn't want a license to protect this, at the end he even explicitly states in spite of this he won't change his process - he just wishes people wouldn't be jerks about this kind of thing. It felt, to me, like he doesn't think he should need a license to enforce this kind of behavior, and instead is going to just call out that the guy is being a jerk. It's also kind of stupid to rip someone off. Assuming all the information here is accurate, this could really come back to bite the guy who ripped him off - someone is going to google what you've done and will end up with this blog post slamming you. If it was an honest mistake, the author should probably take the time to fix the posts and apologize.
madisp 11y ago
IANAL, but doesn't MIT require you to keep the copyright notice though? I mean you're not waiving away your copyright by licensing something with MIT.
bkeroack 11y ago
I imagine it is exceptionally unlikely that he would go to court to enforce any kind of breach of license. Therefore encoding his expectations within the license is approximately equivalent to simply hoping that people not act like jerks (which is how he chooses to handle it currently).
- detaro 11y ago
  No need to go to court: DCMA is a thing and followed by Github, so at least getting his code embed in the medium post down shouldn't be too hard if he wants to do so, since removing the copyright info is pretty clear breach of license. If it's worth "it" is another question: probably not. EDIT: and also IMHO a dick move without talking to him first. Just wanted to remind people that these tools also can work for "normal" people, not just against them.
DannyBee 11y ago
Well, actually, the MIT license requires you not strip the attribution if it was present: "The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. " In this case, it was present in the LICENSE file in the github repository he links to. Not preserving it is a clear license violation in this case, since they took substantial portions of the software.
- thomasahle 11y ago
  Interesting, I always assumed it just meant derivatives had to be MIT as well, but it makes sense. If I made changes to the software, would I just add myself to the Copyright list of authors?
  - aidenn0 11y ago
    That's how I've always done it; not sure if it's correct though.
  - haylem 11y ago
    Derivatives absolutely don't have to be MIT as well. MIT/X11 is not viral. It only requires attribution, but you are free to modify, redistribute and even commercialize as you like, and to re-license your derivative work, as long as you simply give attribution for the original work. But it doesn't mean "claim it as your own", as long as it's not significantly altered.
    - jordigh 11y ago
      > re-license your derivative work, No, you cannot relicense. Only the original authors can do that. You can add on top of the existing code stuff of your own under a different license, so that the combination of the two is under both licenses. Practically, it amounts to almost the same, but for example, you cannot remove conditions such as attribution, which only the original authors can do via a license that does not require attribution.
      - 11y ago
ska 11y ago
It is a pretty sad state of affairs if you really need a licence to explicitly stop people from being ass-hats.
- hvs 11y ago
  That's pretty much the reason why licenses were created.
  - ska 11y ago
    Licenses are a way of codifying rights and responsibilities. Ass-hattery is often completely orthogonal to this concern. Just because I have the right to do something doesn't mean I should, and it doesn't mean I am not being a jerk by exercising that right it certain contexts.
- DannyBee 11y ago
  You actually don't in this case, depending on the state, etc There are all kinds of interesting claims you can make: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1202 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1202 That's ignoring any interesting state law torts. (Of course, i agree with your general point that you shouldn't need a license to get people to stop doing any of this, but such is society and it has been for thousands of years)
- leshow 11y ago
  Really? The entire point of copyleft is this exact thing.
- falsedan 11y ago
  How do you feel about codes of conduct? Most communities have some unwritten social rules which participants have to adhere to (or be shunned). The open-source software community is open to anyone on the planet with an internet connection, so it's disingenuous to pretend they will all get along without conflict/misunderstandings.
ohitsdom 11y ago
He acknowledges that MIT doesn't prevent this in the conclusion: > As my code is MIT-licensed, there’s nothing legally preventing the use of my code this way. However, I’m not going to change my workflow; I will still open-source my data visualization code, and it will have the same licensing. It wouldn’t be fair to punish others who have made very good use of my code. > But outright using the code, without any attribution, and claiming it as your own when it blatantly isn’t, is a jerk move.
- DannyBee 11y ago
  "> As my code is MIT-licensed, there’s nothing legally preventing the use of my code this way. " He's legally wrong, however ;-) Let me clarify: The MIT license does not prevent someone using the code to do a visualization without crediting him. It does, however, prevent taking those snippets without reproducing the copyright notice For anyone who wants to argue about the copyrightability of it, i'll point out A. Google is being sued for 2.6 billion dollars over 9 lines of range check code B. While copyright has some notion of de-minimis, it's not a bright line in the code space. Copyright is more about originality. You can't really say, less than ten lines, do what you want. 10 lines of java does nothing. 10 lines of perl could be an entire OS.
  - PebblesHD 11y ago
    That perl comment is possibly my favourite thing on this site so far.
  - brazzledazzle 11y ago
    >A. Google is being sued for 2.6 billion dollars over 9 lines of range check code If I were a Google exec I'd strongly consider dumping a few million in sponsoring some developers to make postgres's clustering options feature competitive with RAC. You'd never unseat it in some places but a long term commitment to support development from a heavy hitter like Google might go a long way.
patja 11y ago
I've noticed there is a sub-population within open source who believe there is an etiquette to be followed that goes above and beyond the strict license terms. Of course there is no legal obligation to behave according to the oft-unwritten polite rules of behavior around things like attribution and not just making a near carbon copy for personal gain or aggrandizement when these terms are not in the license, and so many ignore them, perhaps even literally being ignorant of these social norms they are violating to the irritation of the original author.
- CountSessine 11y ago
  Of course there is no legal obligation to behave according to the oft-unwritten polite rules of behavior around things like attribution No, there isn't. Which, by the norms and conventions of the gift economy that open source software defines, jerks like this should be named and shamed for this sort of parasitism. Which is what this blog article is doing. You live by the sword, you die by the sword.
mintplant 11y ago
> However the MIT license doesn't require that. That's not true. https://github.com/minimaxir/reddit-bigquery/blob/master/LICENSE https://github.com/minimaxir/reddit-bigquery/blob/master/LIC... > Copyright (c) 2015 Max Woolf [...] > The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
- delinka 11y ago
  But not necessarily presentations, reports, nor other non-software items.
  - IkmoIkmo 11y ago
    He also posted the code in the article, not just a presentation of the results of the code.
  - g42gregory 11y ago
    I could be wrong, but aren't these items would be covered automatically under a general copyright?
    - delinka 11y ago
      Copyright law specifies who owns (and therefore who controls) a 'work.' In the case of software, it does not specify licensing terms. (As opposed to lyrics, musical composition, musical recordings ... which do have compulsory licensing terms specified in law.) Neither the output of computer software, nor the ideas themselves within software, are protected by copyright. Not providing attribution is simply douchey.
minimaxir 11y ago
That's why I preface the post title with "please." I know that attribution isn't required and I can't enforce it, but pretending the original analysis doesn't exist is spiteful.
- bweitzman 11y ago
  Are you going to continue using the MIT license in the future? Or will you use a more restrictive license to encourage people to give you more explicit attribution in the future? Just following the minimum requirements of a license may not be a nice thing to do, but if you're going to be upset because someone did something you said they could but that you didn't really want them too, I can't really sympathize.
- thieving_magpie 11y ago
  Totally unsolicited advice here, dismiss it if you like - consider removing the guy's full name from your posts. As you can see, people are quick to repeat it here in this thread and I'm sure elsewhere. The guy did something wrong and in your words "spiteful", being (much less) spiteful in return isn't going to make anything better. When I was a teenager I did something similar and was caught. I ripped off someone else's site design. The guy wasn't happy, but his response taught me a lot. I'm thankful he didn't put my name out there for the vigilantes of the internet to come calling and I learned to respect the work and creativity of others.
  - leshow 11y ago
    Interesting choice of username considering that past...
    - thieving_magpie 11y ago
      True, though unrelated. Here's where it comes from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_gazza_ladra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_gazza_ladra
- jordigh 11y ago
  I think it's even more spiteful when you write a blog post like this when someone uses your code in the way you intended it to be used. There was no slander against you, was there? If so, that's already covered by laws other than copyright. And if you want more attribution (I'm not sure if the authors' analysis counts as a "substantial" reproduction of your own work), then use a 3-clause BSD, which says, 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. That way, any reproduction of your work that wouldn't fall under fair use requires attribtuion. I'm not sure if the "substantial" part of the MIT license is the same scope as "fair use", but without that adjective, the BSD license might be more explicit about requiring attribution. I have had my own free software used in ways I don't like, but I don't write a blog post about it. After all, I made it free. You want to insult me, mock me, satirise me, print out the source code and wipe your butt with it; go ahead. That's part of what free software must allow. Point is, require with legalese what you want people to do. It's your prerogative. Above all, don't code call copying "stealing". This is not theft. It might not even be copyright infringement. Calling it "stealing" is undue indignation that indicates that they did something worse than what you explicitly allowed.
moistgorilla 11y ago
> However the MIT license doesn't require that It doesn't but the person lying about having written the code can still be shamed for it.
- IkmoIkmo 11y ago
  It does.
qbrass 11y ago
The images aren't part of the software, and shouldn't have been licensed with it. Separate code/assets/associated content, and license them accordingly.
IkmoIkmo 11y ago
> I agree that it is good practice to show attribution, and not directly lie saying you wrote something yourself. However the MIT license doesn't require that. False! This is the license: >> The MIT License (MIT) Copyright (c) 2015 Max Woolf Permission is hereby granted [blabla do whatever you want] subject to the following conditions: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. >> That copyright notice must be included and it wasn't.

lexicalscope 11y ago

I think that's his point - he doesn't want a license to protect this, at the end he even explicitly states in spite of this he won't change his process - he just wishes people wouldn't be jerks about this kind of thing. It felt, to me, like he doesn't think he should need a license to enforce this kind of behavior, and instead is going to just call out that the guy is being a jerk. It's also kind of stupid to rip someone off. Assuming all the information here is accurate, this could really come back to bite the guy who ripped him off - someone is going to google what you've done and will end up with this blog post slamming you. If it was an honest mistake, the author should probably take the time to fix the posts and apologize.

madisp 11y ago

IANAL, but doesn't MIT require you to keep the copyright notice though? I mean you're not waiving away your copyright by licensing something with MIT.

bkeroack 11y ago

I imagine it is exceptionally unlikely that he would go to court to enforce any kind of breach of license. Therefore encoding his expectations within the license is approximately equivalent to simply hoping that people not act like jerks (which is how he chooses to handle it currently).

detaro 11y ago
No need to go to court: DCMA is a thing and followed by Github, so at least getting his code embed in the medium post down shouldn't be too hard if he wants to do so, since removing the copyright info is pretty clear breach of license. If it's worth "it" is another question: probably not. EDIT: and also IMHO a dick move without talking to him first. Just wanted to remind people that these tools also can work for "normal" people, not just against them.

DannyBee 11y ago

Well, actually, the MIT license requires you not strip the attribution if it was present: "The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. " In this case, it was present in the LICENSE file in the github repository he links to. Not preserving it is a clear license violation in this case, since they took substantial portions of the software.

thomasahle 11y ago
Interesting, I always assumed it just meant derivatives had to be MIT as well, but it makes sense. If I made changes to the software, would I just add myself to the Copyright list of authors?
- aidenn0 11y ago
  That's how I've always done it; not sure if it's correct though.
- haylem 11y ago
  Derivatives absolutely don't have to be MIT as well. MIT/X11 is not viral. It only requires attribution, but you are free to modify, redistribute and even commercialize as you like, and to re-license your derivative work, as long as you simply give attribution for the original work. But it doesn't mean "claim it as your own", as long as it's not significantly altered.
  - jordigh 11y ago
    > re-license your derivative work, No, you cannot relicense. Only the original authors can do that. You can add on top of the existing code stuff of your own under a different license, so that the combination of the two is under both licenses. Practically, it amounts to almost the same, but for example, you cannot remove conditions such as attribution, which only the original authors can do via a license that does not require attribution.
    - 11y ago

ska 11y ago

It is a pretty sad state of affairs if you really need a licence to explicitly stop people from being ass-hats.

hvs 11y ago
That's pretty much the reason why licenses were created.
- ska 11y ago
  Licenses are a way of codifying rights and responsibilities. Ass-hattery is often completely orthogonal to this concern. Just because I have the right to do something doesn't mean I should, and it doesn't mean I am not being a jerk by exercising that right it certain contexts.
DannyBee 11y ago
You actually don't in this case, depending on the state, etc There are all kinds of interesting claims you can make: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1202 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1202 That's ignoring any interesting state law torts. (Of course, i agree with your general point that you shouldn't need a license to get people to stop doing any of this, but such is society and it has been for thousands of years)
leshow 11y ago
Really? The entire point of copyleft is this exact thing.
falsedan 11y ago
How do you feel about codes of conduct? Most communities have some unwritten social rules which participants have to adhere to (or be shunned). The open-source software community is open to anyone on the planet with an internet connection, so it's disingenuous to pretend they will all get along without conflict/misunderstandings.

ohitsdom 11y ago

He acknowledges that MIT doesn't prevent this in the conclusion: > As my code is MIT-licensed, there’s nothing legally preventing the use of my code this way. However, I’m not going to change my workflow; I will still open-source my data visualization code, and it will have the same licensing. It wouldn’t be fair to punish others who have made very good use of my code. > But outright using the code, without any attribution, and claiming it as your own when it blatantly isn’t, is a jerk move.

DannyBee 11y ago
"> As my code is MIT-licensed, there’s nothing legally preventing the use of my code this way. " He's legally wrong, however ;-) Let me clarify: The MIT license does not prevent someone using the code to do a visualization without crediting him. It does, however, prevent taking those snippets without reproducing the copyright notice For anyone who wants to argue about the copyrightability of it, i'll point out A. Google is being sued for 2.6 billion dollars over 9 lines of range check code B. While copyright has some notion of de-minimis, it's not a bright line in the code space. Copyright is more about originality. You can't really say, less than ten lines, do what you want. 10 lines of java does nothing. 10 lines of perl could be an entire OS.
- PebblesHD 11y ago
  That perl comment is possibly my favourite thing on this site so far.
- brazzledazzle 11y ago
  >A. Google is being sued for 2.6 billion dollars over 9 lines of range check code If I were a Google exec I'd strongly consider dumping a few million in sponsoring some developers to make postgres's clustering options feature competitive with RAC. You'd never unseat it in some places but a long term commitment to support development from a heavy hitter like Google might go a long way.

patja 11y ago

I've noticed there is a sub-population within open source who believe there is an etiquette to be followed that goes above and beyond the strict license terms. Of course there is no legal obligation to behave according to the oft-unwritten polite rules of behavior around things like attribution and not just making a near carbon copy for personal gain or aggrandizement when these terms are not in the license, and so many ignore them, perhaps even literally being ignorant of these social norms they are violating to the irritation of the original author.

CountSessine 11y ago
Of course there is no legal obligation to behave according to the oft-unwritten polite rules of behavior around things like attribution No, there isn't. Which, by the norms and conventions of the gift economy that open source software defines, jerks like this should be named and shamed for this sort of parasitism. Which is what this blog article is doing. You live by the sword, you die by the sword.

mintplant 11y ago

> However the MIT license doesn't require that. That's not true. https://github.com/minimaxir/reddit-bigquery/blob/master/LICENSE https://github.com/minimaxir/reddit-bigquery/blob/master/LIC... > Copyright (c) 2015 Max Woolf [...] > The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

delinka 11y ago
But not necessarily presentations, reports, nor other non-software items.
- IkmoIkmo 11y ago
  He also posted the code in the article, not just a presentation of the results of the code.
- g42gregory 11y ago
  I could be wrong, but aren't these items would be covered automatically under a general copyright?
  - delinka 11y ago
    Copyright law specifies who owns (and therefore who controls) a 'work.' In the case of software, it does not specify licensing terms. (As opposed to lyrics, musical composition, musical recordings ... which do have compulsory licensing terms specified in law.) Neither the output of computer software, nor the ideas themselves within software, are protected by copyright. Not providing attribution is simply douchey.

minimaxir 11y ago

That's why I preface the post title with "please." I know that attribution isn't required and I can't enforce it, but pretending the original analysis doesn't exist is spiteful.

bweitzman 11y ago
Are you going to continue using the MIT license in the future? Or will you use a more restrictive license to encourage people to give you more explicit attribution in the future? Just following the minimum requirements of a license may not be a nice thing to do, but if you're going to be upset because someone did something you said they could but that you didn't really want them too, I can't really sympathize.
thieving_magpie 11y ago
Totally unsolicited advice here, dismiss it if you like - consider removing the guy's full name from your posts. As you can see, people are quick to repeat it here in this thread and I'm sure elsewhere. The guy did something wrong and in your words "spiteful", being (much less) spiteful in return isn't going to make anything better. When I was a teenager I did something similar and was caught. I ripped off someone else's site design. The guy wasn't happy, but his response taught me a lot. I'm thankful he didn't put my name out there for the vigilantes of the internet to come calling and I learned to respect the work and creativity of others.
- leshow 11y ago
  Interesting choice of username considering that past...
  - thieving_magpie 11y ago
    True, though unrelated. Here's where it comes from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_gazza_ladra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_gazza_ladra
jordigh 11y ago
I think it's even more spiteful when you write a blog post like this when someone uses your code in the way you intended it to be used. There was no slander against you, was there? If so, that's already covered by laws other than copyright. And if you want more attribution (I'm not sure if the authors' analysis counts as a "substantial" reproduction of your own work), then use a 3-clause BSD, which says, 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. That way, any reproduction of your work that wouldn't fall under fair use requires attribtuion. I'm not sure if the "substantial" part of the MIT license is the same scope as "fair use", but without that adjective, the BSD license might be more explicit about requiring attribution. I have had my own free software used in ways I don't like, but I don't write a blog post about it. After all, I made it free. You want to insult me, mock me, satirise me, print out the source code and wipe your butt with it; go ahead. That's part of what free software must allow. Point is, require with legalese what you want people to do. It's your prerogative. Above all, don't code call copying "stealing". This is not theft. It might not even be copyright infringement. Calling it "stealing" is undue indignation that indicates that they did something worse than what you explicitly allowed.

moistgorilla 11y ago

> However the MIT license doesn't require that It doesn't but the person lying about having written the code can still be shamed for it.

IkmoIkmo 11y ago
It does.

qbrass 11y ago

The images aren't part of the software, and shouldn't have been licensed with it. Separate code/assets/associated content, and license them accordingly.

IkmoIkmo 11y ago

> I agree that it is good practice to show attribution, and not directly lie saying you wrote something yourself. However the MIT license doesn't require that. False! This is the license: >> The MIT License (MIT) Copyright (c) 2015 Max Woolf Permission is hereby granted [blabla do whatever you want] subject to the following conditions: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. >> That copyright notice must be included and it wasn't.