3 ms·

Honestly I think you could be a little more respectful of the project that inspired yours. I'd be angry too if someone reworked a project of mine with a similar

by ktm5j 5y ago

Honestly I think you could be a little more respectful of the project that inspired yours. I'd be angry too if someone reworked a project of mine with a similar name and made direct statements about my project (true or not) to try and sway people to your project. And you plagiarized part of his readme. Definitely understandable. And here you're still saying negative things, like pointing out shortcomings (that you don't describe) and calling it spaghetti code (which isn't immediately verifiable). Maybe he wouldn't be so angry at you if you didn't do these things.

Osiris 5y ago
Is it plagiarism if the license of the original source allows such copying and the author complied with the license? Isn't this outcome an expected one in which source code is made available to the public?
- j16sdiz 5y ago
  plagiarism is about a mix of ethics, etiquette and respect. "comply with the license" is the minimal legal requirement. They are related, but it is not the same.
zozbot234 5y ago
> Honestly I think you could be a little more respectful of the project that inspired yours. Forking a poorly maintained project is the foremost kind of respect in the FLOSS community. Way too much useful code ends up bitrotting beyond recovery simply because of not enough people being willing to put in the challenging work involved in rescuing it. Note that there's absolutely no blame involved in describing a project as "poorly maintained" by commonly accepted standards. (In this case, the original author themselves describes suffering from severe burnout and other challenging circumstances which took a serious toll on their willingness to work on that codebase. So their situation is understandable indeed! Good FLOSS stewardship relies on other people being willing to step up promptly when these situations arise, regardless of the underlying causes.)
st_goliath 5y ago
> Honestly I think you could be a little more respectful of the project that inspired yours. I actually am. I had a lot of great "Huh? That's clever!" moments while reverse engineering the format and formed a mental image of a clearly brilliant programmer who managed to squeeze the last bits out of some data structures using really clever tricks that I myself probably wouldn't have come up with. During that time I gained a lot of respect for the project and the author. Also, please don't forget: the whole project is the filesystem, the tools are just a part of that. I care about this project, which is why I decided to start this effort in the first place. Which I explicitly did not advertise as a replacement, but an augmentation (see [2]). > I'd be angry too ... Definitely understandable. Yes, I agree! And I can understand why in the heat of the moment you might write something angry and threatening. But certainly not if you've had a few weeks time to calm down and think things over. Still publicly spewing vitriol at this point will certainly make me loose some of that respect again. > And you plagiarized part of his readme. https://github.com/plougher/squashfs-tools/blob/master/RELEASE-READMEs/README-4.3 https://github.com/plougher/squashfs-tools/blob/master/RELEA... https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/Documentation/filesystems/squashfs.rst https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin... https://github.com/AgentD/squashfs-tools-ng/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/AgentD/squashfs-tools-ng/blob/master/READ... Oh yes? Which part? > ... calling it spaghetti code (which isn't immediately verifiable) Here you go, have fun: https://github.com/plougher/squashfs-tools/blob/master/squashfs-tools/mksquashfs.c https://github.com/plougher/squashfs-tools/blob/master/squas... However, I cannot blame anyone here, I totally get how those things happen and have witnessed it myself in action: You write a simple tool supporting a larger project. It's written by the seat of your pants without much planning, since it's not big and does one simple job. Then it gets used in production, eventually requirements change, other people pile on patches, but try to keep the diff small, so it's reviewable. It keeps growing and growing, getting more and more complex, but receives maybe a little less care than the actual project it supports. Nobody bothers to overhaul it or write documentation because, hey, it works, and any large changes might risk breaking things. Even if nobody is to blame for it, the end result is still the same: an undocumented mess that is hard to wrap your head around if you aren't the original author, who is the only one with the bigger picture. I tried for roughly a week to pull the code (there are some more files than this and some of the inter dependencies are nasty) apart into stacked utility libraries and a pure command line parsing front end, with the hopes to maybe get this upstream once it is done. I gave up and decided that at this point I understood enough about the format to start afresh and not touch what I believed to be unmaintained anyway.
JasonFruit 5y ago
I bet a lot of these statements were made in the same spirit with which we've all gone through someone else's years-old code: "What the heck is this even trying to do? Who wrote this stuff?" We say that, even though we know full well that we've written stuff just as bad, and that there's a script we wrote and are dreading someday having to maintain. It's a long way from that to "libel" and "defamation", the accusations the originator of squashfs was throwing around. I'd say that he was far more out of line than the new toolset's author.
dmitrygr 5y ago
st_goliath improved a widely used project. What did you do to earn the right to criticize?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

by ktm5j 5y ago

Osiris 5y ago

Is it plagiarism if the license of the original source allows such copying and the author complied with the license? Isn't this outcome an expected one in which source code is made available to the public?

j16sdiz 5y ago
plagiarism is about a mix of ethics, etiquette and respect. "comply with the license" is the minimal legal requirement. They are related, but it is not the same.

zozbot234 5y ago

> Honestly I think you could be a little more respectful of the project that inspired yours. Forking a poorly maintained project is the foremost kind of respect in the FLOSS community. Way too much useful code ends up bitrotting beyond recovery simply because of not enough people being willing to put in the challenging work involved in rescuing it. Note that there's absolutely no blame involved in describing a project as "poorly maintained" by commonly accepted standards. (In this case, the original author themselves describes suffering from severe burnout and other challenging circumstances which took a serious toll on their willingness to work on that codebase. So their situation is understandable indeed! Good FLOSS stewardship relies on other people being willing to step up promptly when these situations arise, regardless of the underlying causes.)

st_goliath 5y ago

> Honestly I think you could be a little more respectful of the project that inspired yours. I actually am. I had a lot of great "Huh? That's clever!" moments while reverse engineering the format and formed a mental image of a clearly brilliant programmer who managed to squeeze the last bits out of some data structures using really clever tricks that I myself probably wouldn't have come up with. During that time I gained a lot of respect for the project and the author. Also, please don't forget: the whole project is the filesystem, the tools are just a part of that. I care about this project, which is why I decided to start this effort in the first place. Which I explicitly did not advertise as a replacement, but an augmentation (see [2]). > I'd be angry too ... Definitely understandable. Yes, I agree! And I can understand why in the heat of the moment you might write something angry and threatening. But certainly not if you've had a few weeks time to calm down and think things over. Still publicly spewing vitriol at this point will certainly make me loose some of that respect again. > And you plagiarized part of his readme. https://github.com/plougher/squashfs-tools/blob/master/RELEASE-READMEs/README-4.3 https://github.com/plougher/squashfs-tools/blob/master/RELEA... https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/Documentation/filesystems/squashfs.rst https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin... https://github.com/AgentD/squashfs-tools-ng/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/AgentD/squashfs-tools-ng/blob/master/READ... Oh yes? Which part? > ... calling it spaghetti code (which isn't immediately verifiable) Here you go, have fun: https://github.com/plougher/squashfs-tools/blob/master/squashfs-tools/mksquashfs.c https://github.com/plougher/squashfs-tools/blob/master/squas... However, I cannot blame anyone here, I totally get how those things happen and have witnessed it myself in action: You write a simple tool supporting a larger project. It's written by the seat of your pants without much planning, since it's not big and does one simple job. Then it gets used in production, eventually requirements change, other people pile on patches, but try to keep the diff small, so it's reviewable. It keeps growing and growing, getting more and more complex, but receives maybe a little less care than the actual project it supports. Nobody bothers to overhaul it or write documentation because, hey, it works, and any large changes might risk breaking things. Even if nobody is to blame for it, the end result is still the same: an undocumented mess that is hard to wrap your head around if you aren't the original author, who is the only one with the bigger picture. I tried for roughly a week to pull the code (there are some more files than this and some of the inter dependencies are nasty) apart into stacked utility libraries and a pure command line parsing front end, with the hopes to maybe get this upstream once it is done. I gave up and decided that at this point I understood enough about the format to start afresh and not touch what I believed to be unmaintained anyway.

JasonFruit 5y ago

I bet a lot of these statements were made in the same spirit with which we've all gone through someone else's years-old code: "What the heck is this even trying to do? Who wrote this stuff?" We say that, even though we know full well that we've written stuff just as bad, and that there's a script we wrote and are dreading someday having to maintain. It's a long way from that to "libel" and "defamation", the accusations the originator of squashfs was throwing around. I'd say that he was far more out of line than the new toolset's author.

dmitrygr 5y ago

st_goliath improved a widely used project. What did you do to earn the right to criticize?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]