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Except the FB project is a complete rewrite, done by one of their employee. There is no "stealing" here. You wouldn't tell someone who wrote a link bit.ly clone
by belval 6y ago
Except the FB project is a complete rewrite, done by one of their employee. There is no "stealing" here. You wouldn't tell someone who wrote a link bit.ly clone that he "stole" the idea from the original website. Even if they had copy and pasted OP's code (which they didn't), it's MIT-licensed and only minimal restrictions apply.
There are things that are wrong with how these big corporation operate, but this is not one of them. This is more akin to a small shop called "Play Store" not registering a domain name and then making a post on HN when Google registers it for Android.
- dilyevsky 6y agoYes it is more of “Abibas” knockoffs you can by somewhere in asia/middle east except you know that fact that it’s trillion dollar corporation doing it
- mafuy 6y agoYou have to differentiate between a rewrite with vs without looking at the original. A clean room rewrite is generally accepted (i.e. derive spec from original, then have the spec implemented by someone who does not know the original). Looking at the source while writing some kind of copy of it is a violation (legal and ethical). As per the thread there, the FB person did indeed see the original.
- belval 6y agoIn this case the code is licensed under MIT so I really fail to see what you mean by a legal or moral violation. There is a subset of the open source community that seems to default to the MIT license and then act surprised when their project is used in a way that is not what they had in mind.