9 ms·

It's concerning how many self-labelled software engineers on Twitter are chipping in with comments like "it's open source so it's fair game" or "they just need

It's concerning how many self-labelled software engineers on Twitter are chipping in with comments like "it's open source so it's fair game" or "they just need to add attribution".

mikeryan 5y ago
So, I’m unclear on this if, and I don’t know if this is true, TikTok just creates a UI that “execs” commands to an unmodified OBS executable cli - What is their actual responsibility here?
- pavon 5y ago
  They are distributing the OBS executable, therefore they have an obligation to also distribute the source to those same people on request, and to let them know about their rights to receive the source under the GPL. If OBS really is running standalone, then that is the extent of their responsibilities. If on the other-hand, OBS is being combined with other software to create a derivative work, then they must distribute the full source of that derivative work as well. What constitutes a derivative work is more complicated. It is ultimately a decision for courts, though many folks (including FSF) have opinions on what should and shouldn't be considered a derivative work.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
criddell 5y ago
It might not be like this everywhere, but in the US all software engineers are self-labelled. It's not like medical doctor (MD) or professional engineer (PE) where the title actually implies some license to practice.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  Common misconception, but Software Engineer is actually a licensed profession in many states (with vague industry exemptions): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineering_professionalism#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineering_professio... But virtually nobody does it. The NCEES even abandoned their Software Engineer licensing exam a few years ago because nobody was taking it.
  - anthk 5y ago
    In Europe being an engineer has civil accountability on issues. You can be fined really high if you hire a self-called engineer without a proper degree. Or at least decades of alleged experience in the field.
    - k12sosse 5y ago
      Especially without the accountability. Call yourself a software engineer? Did your code break? Is it vulnerable to exploits? What was the damage? Did you ship it knowing it was not fit for public usage? Congratulations! you're no longer allowed to program for a living and the state is suing you and your employer for damages.
      - saghm 5y ago
        I think part of the problem is that compared to more traditional forms of engineering, software engineering is still really young and not as rigorous. Right now, _nobody_ can write code without any bugs it in whatsoever. If we banned people who wrote buggy code, pretty soon we'd have no software engineers left. Regardless of whether you think that's a good idea, it seems pretty clear that at the very least there is a lot of demand for programmers, so it's unlikely the industry would get behind limiting that further in such a drastic way.
        pjmlp 5y ago
        The issue is not banning, rather lack of liability. Even the cook at the bistro on the corner is liable if the food, cleaning or refrigeration isn't as it is supposed to be
        criddell 5y ago
        > If we banned people who wrote buggy code That's not the standard for any kind of engineering. Professional Engineers make errors all the time. But they also design systems with fail safes, redundancies, safety factors, etc... You design systems with the expectation that failures will happen. Users will do stupid things. Highly improbably sequences will probably happen. Not all code needs to be designed so carefully. Nobody cares if Hacker News is offline for a few hours. But the software systems in self driving cars or running an MRI machine probably should be designed by licensed professionals who can stand up to their bosses and say "this can't ship until these improvements are made" because if it does ship, they can be personally sued for malpractice and lose their license.
- mmcgaha 5y ago
  It has been many years since After The Gold Rush was published and we are no closer today than we were then. At some point software engineering will be a real profession but I doubt anyone will take action before some huge catastrophe pushes the issue.
  - criddell 5y ago
    I think you are right and it's too bad. There are some fields that should have it. For example, the software for self-driving cars should be signed off by a licensed engineer before it is allowed to go live. Many mechanical and electrical parts of the car have been designed by licensed professionals, why not the software?
    - dognotdog 5y ago
      One can verify and sign off on computations that approximate the physics or chemistry that will occur in a structure or machine, as a well established chain of procedures exist to go from crude formulaic approximations to micro or, if necessary, nano-scale simulations of electrical, mechanical, and chemical processes, and we know what to look for. I don't think the same is true for software "engineering," as it seems that all possible forms of process can be subverted and cargo-culted, from agile methods down to code checking. Certainly there is room to remedy some shortcomings, but SWE definitely is the engineering discipline least based in physical fact. The physics behind simulating the buckling of a structure is always the same, we can just choose more or less crude approximations of it, but SWE in general seems a lot more diverse. I can implement that simulation in assembly or some scripting language, and attach various bits and pieces to it to manage users and data; deploy it across the cloud if need be. But, there isn't a singular, time-invariant optimal path to achieving that, and what is true today may not be true tomorrow. One can work off basic principles, like the Agile Manifesto, but how can you quantify or even certify this shifting landscape?
      - grandchild 5y ago
        Having studied both mechanical and software engineering at uni, I feel that you _can_ make the parallel between the two. It's just that in mechanical engineering we've converged a lot more over time. Out of convention and need for accountability much more than necessity. For example, for mechanical calculations we have converged on using mostly the same algebraic notation (never mind having minor differences here and there, such as in vector notation). Having an obscene amount of different notations, some so different that they are for the most part unintelligible to half the engineers out there, that would be unthinkable in ME, but is the norm in SE. The _physics_ of a buckling structure may be always the same. But already the modelling techniques are far from obvious consensus: Do you do it analytically? Do you use FEM? BEM? Then there are a bunch of simulation techniques, i.e. for numerical integration, which you could use, much like you could use functional or imperative programming or OOP or whatever else. So if we were to behave more like the _software_ branch of the engineering discipline in general, then we'd have a _much_ tighter space of languages that would be at all acceptable for any work deemed critical, like medical, administrative or aeronautical software.
- ipaddr 5y ago
  Engineer is a legal term in some place where a degree is required in engineering. The term developer doesn't require a license neither does CEO or board member or president of the US.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- oliwarner 5y ago
  But you can be considered a software engineer by your peers, usually demonstrated through qualification and professional experience. The differentiation I was trying to draw with those two words is: I don't know if they're actually working software developers or people who just hack on code in their free time. If they're professional devs, that's obviously much worse. Honestly, not the part of that I was expecting to have to discuss.
skeeter2020 5y ago
In many jurisidictions "Engineer" is a licensed and regulated title, and their professional organizations have tried to regulate it, but lost the war. We know have actual engineering programs that focus on software and 6-week bootcamps graduating people who claim to be "Software Engineers", so add it to the list of appropriated words right next to "Geek".
- lainga 5y ago
  The attitude on (mostly American) HN is against licensing bodies, as far as I've seen in the past.
  - tata71 5y ago
    If you saw, or were exposed to, how many thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours it takes native professionals to get licensed to do hair braiding or cutting, you'd be disenfranchised, too.
    - lainga 5y ago
      Native professional like native-born American? In my case I pay about 300 CAD a year to EGBC and have not heard from my colleagues that getting a P.Eng in BC is a significant time-sink. You have to have 4 years of work experience, get your work certified, and then do a couple exams. I would believe dozens of hours, but not hundreds.
- emaginniss 5y ago
  Right, "geek" should go back to the original definition: a person who bites the head off of a chicken in a carnival show.
  - mometsi 5y ago
    And he is a foole, a sotte, and a geke also, Which choseth a place vnto the same to go, And where diuers wayes lead thither directly He choseth the worst and most of ieopardie https://www.otago.ac.nz/english-linguistics/tudor/BarcEclogues.html https://www.otago.ac.nz/english-linguistics/tudor/BarcEclogu...
throwhauser 5y ago
It's reminiscent of people adding "no copyright intended" (sic) when posting other people's music online. It seems like intuitions about copyright have been shifting, even if the law hasn't.
- minimaxir 5y ago
  At the least, the internet eventually realized that "you must delete your video game ROMs within 24 hours of obtaining them" is not a valid legal stance.
  - ludamad 5y ago
    Oh that jogs forgotten memories.
    - codetrotter 5y ago
      Anyone remember that disclaimer some pirate websites used to have where they said something starting with something like “On October 28, 1998, President Clinton signed into law the Digital Millennium Copyright Act”, and the disclaimer went on to mention some DMCA exceptions like learning and teaching or something? Always gave me a chuckle. As if saying that the DMCA does not apply for you is enough to make it actually so.
- slantyyz 5y ago
  > It seems like intuitions about copyright have been shifting, even if the law hasn't. I think people actually know it's wrong and legally questionable. I believe they do it because they simply want to do it and in the back of their minds, hope adding some bogus disclaimer will let them get away with it... because other people seem to be getting away with it.
  - HWR_14 5y ago
    I think people think it's legally wrong but not morally wrong, and so they add a bogus disclaimer hoping that they can get away with it because other people have.
yumraj 5y ago
Probably they are employed at companies who are themselves violating GPL and have seen this being done there.
- delusional 5y ago
  How do you think companies end up violating GPL. Maybe sometimes it's a heartless executive, but a lot of enterprise software devs are completely unconcerned with licenses. If they can get their hands on it, the license doesn't matter.
  - jermaustin1 5y ago
    I had a senior dev at a past job who did this constantly. And when it was found out how much he actually stole, our entire team was laid off and replaced by the company that did the audit. He just refused to believe that software licenses were real. That and I dont think he could actually code anything from scratch without stealing large swaths of code from open source repositories.
    - vkat 5y ago
      Copy/paste without attribution to license or permission is more blatant.
      - jermaustin1 5y ago
        Organizationally he was given free reign to do whatever he wanted, and that lead to the entire teams downfall. He canceled code reviews... for himself. Well, he actually stated, all code reviews go through him, thus he "code reviewed" his own code. I remember he was once a few weeks late on delivering a basic landing page, and when it finally got to QA at 9pm on a Friday, our entire team was forced to work the weekend and QA gave me a TFS export of more than 200 defects I had to fix because he was unreachable. Needless to say, our entire team was upset we all got laid off, but also relieved because we all ended up in better jobs. At least everyone I've talked to, which is everyone but him, as he has never responded to a single text message or email since he quit after the layoff (he refused severance, and just walked out), all his socials went off line, and any record of his name has disappeared from the internet. I'm fairly certain he was a conman, but I have no way of finding out.
SavantIdiot 5y ago
There are subtleties not captured by this quick overview which are not fully understood by (in my experience) the vast majority of programmers: https://choosealicense.com/licenses/ https://choosealicense.com/licenses/ If your project is going to be "real" (e.g., not some personal throwaway), you really need a lawyer if you are including anything other than MIT. Even Apache can be problematic when it comes to patenting.
- gus_massa 5y ago
  What about BSD?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - krylon 5y ago
    I am not a lawyer, but the (2-clause) BSD and MIT licenses look nearly identical to me. The wording is slightly different, but I think they express the same intent.
znpy 5y ago
> self-labelled software engineers are you implying there should be requirements to label yourself as an engineer? like a degree in engineering ?
- vineyardmike 5y ago
  This is already a thing in the US.
908B64B197 5y ago
I wish "software engineer" meant something. There are CMU/MIT grads using the tittle alongside 3 month bootcamp grads. I also have to wonder, with the owners of Tik Tok really being ByteDance (字节跳动) if the dissrespect for IP really isn't cultural.
- paxys 5y ago
  The title isn't what's important, it's your skills and what you can do with them. The MIT grad and 3 month bootcamp grad both have the same opportunity to complete and prove themselves, which is unique to the software field. Lack of artificial barriers and gatekeeping is the very reason why the industry is able to thrive.
  - 908B64B197 5y ago
    But you get these twitter threads that are highly missleading. Would be great to have some quality control at some point. This doesn't make real engineers look good in the eyes of the public. Same thing with medical profesionnals spreading anti-vaxx news around.
koonsolo 5y ago
Maybe it's a generational thing. In the olden days, Open Source was basically GPL. But nowadays, Open Source is basically BSD. So I get it that all the npm developers don't really consider that some licenses might be restrictive.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
dang 5y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29592556 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29592556.
viktorcode 5y ago
Most likely that's the reason of OBS' code ending up in TikTok's product. Some engineer disregarded the license with no insidious intention to steal.
- mr_toad 5y ago
  It’s even possible that the developer tried to get the product to be compliant and was ignored.

It's concerning how many self-labelled software engineers on Twitter are chipping in with comments like "it's open source so it's fair game" or "they just need to add attribution".

mikeryan 5y ago

So, I’m unclear on this if, and I don’t know if this is true, TikTok just creates a UI that “execs” commands to an unmodified OBS executable cli - What is their actual responsibility here?

pavon 5y ago
They are distributing the OBS executable, therefore they have an obligation to also distribute the source to those same people on request, and to let them know about their rights to receive the source under the GPL. If OBS really is running standalone, then that is the extent of their responsibilities. If on the other-hand, OBS is being combined with other software to create a derivative work, then they must distribute the full source of that derivative work as well. What constitutes a derivative work is more complicated. It is ultimately a decision for courts, though many folks (including FSF) have opinions on what should and shouldn't be considered a derivative work.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

criddell 5y ago

It might not be like this everywhere, but in the US all software engineers are self-labelled. It's not like medical doctor (MD) or professional engineer (PE) where the title actually implies some license to practice.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
Common misconception, but Software Engineer is actually a licensed profession in many states (with vague industry exemptions): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineering_professionalism#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineering_professio... But virtually nobody does it. The NCEES even abandoned their Software Engineer licensing exam a few years ago because nobody was taking it.
- anthk 5y ago
  In Europe being an engineer has civil accountability on issues. You can be fined really high if you hire a self-called engineer without a proper degree. Or at least decades of alleged experience in the field.
  - k12sosse 5y ago
    Especially without the accountability. Call yourself a software engineer? Did your code break? Is it vulnerable to exploits? What was the damage? Did you ship it knowing it was not fit for public usage? Congratulations! you're no longer allowed to program for a living and the state is suing you and your employer for damages.
    - saghm 5y ago
      I think part of the problem is that compared to more traditional forms of engineering, software engineering is still really young and not as rigorous. Right now, _nobody_ can write code without any bugs it in whatsoever. If we banned people who wrote buggy code, pretty soon we'd have no software engineers left. Regardless of whether you think that's a good idea, it seems pretty clear that at the very least there is a lot of demand for programmers, so it's unlikely the industry would get behind limiting that further in such a drastic way.
      - pjmlp 5y ago
        The issue is not banning, rather lack of liability. Even the cook at the bistro on the corner is liable if the food, cleaning or refrigeration isn't as it is supposed to be
      - criddell 5y ago
        > If we banned people who wrote buggy code That's not the standard for any kind of engineering. Professional Engineers make errors all the time. But they also design systems with fail safes, redundancies, safety factors, etc... You design systems with the expectation that failures will happen. Users will do stupid things. Highly improbably sequences will probably happen. Not all code needs to be designed so carefully. Nobody cares if Hacker News is offline for a few hours. But the software systems in self driving cars or running an MRI machine probably should be designed by licensed professionals who can stand up to their bosses and say "this can't ship until these improvements are made" because if it does ship, they can be personally sued for malpractice and lose their license.
mmcgaha 5y ago
It has been many years since After The Gold Rush was published and we are no closer today than we were then. At some point software engineering will be a real profession but I doubt anyone will take action before some huge catastrophe pushes the issue.
- criddell 5y ago
  I think you are right and it's too bad. There are some fields that should have it. For example, the software for self-driving cars should be signed off by a licensed engineer before it is allowed to go live. Many mechanical and electrical parts of the car have been designed by licensed professionals, why not the software?
  - dognotdog 5y ago
    One can verify and sign off on computations that approximate the physics or chemistry that will occur in a structure or machine, as a well established chain of procedures exist to go from crude formulaic approximations to micro or, if necessary, nano-scale simulations of electrical, mechanical, and chemical processes, and we know what to look for. I don't think the same is true for software "engineering," as it seems that all possible forms of process can be subverted and cargo-culted, from agile methods down to code checking. Certainly there is room to remedy some shortcomings, but SWE definitely is the engineering discipline least based in physical fact. The physics behind simulating the buckling of a structure is always the same, we can just choose more or less crude approximations of it, but SWE in general seems a lot more diverse. I can implement that simulation in assembly or some scripting language, and attach various bits and pieces to it to manage users and data; deploy it across the cloud if need be. But, there isn't a singular, time-invariant optimal path to achieving that, and what is true today may not be true tomorrow. One can work off basic principles, like the Agile Manifesto, but how can you quantify or even certify this shifting landscape?
    - grandchild 5y ago
      Having studied both mechanical and software engineering at uni, I feel that you _can_ make the parallel between the two. It's just that in mechanical engineering we've converged a lot more over time. Out of convention and need for accountability much more than necessity. For example, for mechanical calculations we have converged on using mostly the same algebraic notation (never mind having minor differences here and there, such as in vector notation). Having an obscene amount of different notations, some so different that they are for the most part unintelligible to half the engineers out there, that would be unthinkable in ME, but is the norm in SE. The _physics_ of a buckling structure may be always the same. But already the modelling techniques are far from obvious consensus: Do you do it analytically? Do you use FEM? BEM? Then there are a bunch of simulation techniques, i.e. for numerical integration, which you could use, much like you could use functional or imperative programming or OOP or whatever else. So if we were to behave more like the _software_ branch of the engineering discipline in general, then we'd have a _much_ tighter space of languages that would be at all acceptable for any work deemed critical, like medical, administrative or aeronautical software.
ipaddr 5y ago
Engineer is a legal term in some place where a degree is required in engineering. The term developer doesn't require a license neither does CEO or board member or president of the US.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
oliwarner 5y ago
But you can be considered a software engineer by your peers, usually demonstrated through qualification and professional experience. The differentiation I was trying to draw with those two words is: I don't know if they're actually working software developers or people who just hack on code in their free time. If they're professional devs, that's obviously much worse. Honestly, not the part of that I was expecting to have to discuss.

skeeter2020 5y ago

In many jurisidictions "Engineer" is a licensed and regulated title, and their professional organizations have tried to regulate it, but lost the war. We know have actual engineering programs that focus on software and 6-week bootcamps graduating people who claim to be "Software Engineers", so add it to the list of appropriated words right next to "Geek".

lainga 5y ago
The attitude on (mostly American) HN is against licensing bodies, as far as I've seen in the past.
- tata71 5y ago
  If you saw, or were exposed to, how many thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours it takes native professionals to get licensed to do hair braiding or cutting, you'd be disenfranchised, too.
  - lainga 5y ago
    Native professional like native-born American? In my case I pay about 300 CAD a year to EGBC and have not heard from my colleagues that getting a P.Eng in BC is a significant time-sink. You have to have 4 years of work experience, get your work certified, and then do a couple exams. I would believe dozens of hours, but not hundreds.
emaginniss 5y ago
Right, "geek" should go back to the original definition: a person who bites the head off of a chicken in a carnival show.
- mometsi 5y ago
  And he is a foole, a sotte, and a geke also, Which choseth a place vnto the same to go, And where diuers wayes lead thither directly He choseth the worst and most of ieopardie https://www.otago.ac.nz/english-linguistics/tudor/BarcEclogues.html https://www.otago.ac.nz/english-linguistics/tudor/BarcEclogu...

throwhauser 5y ago

It's reminiscent of people adding "no copyright intended" (sic) when posting other people's music online. It seems like intuitions about copyright have been shifting, even if the law hasn't.

minimaxir 5y ago
At the least, the internet eventually realized that "you must delete your video game ROMs within 24 hours of obtaining them" is not a valid legal stance.
- ludamad 5y ago
  Oh that jogs forgotten memories.
  - codetrotter 5y ago
    Anyone remember that disclaimer some pirate websites used to have where they said something starting with something like “On October 28, 1998, President Clinton signed into law the Digital Millennium Copyright Act”, and the disclaimer went on to mention some DMCA exceptions like learning and teaching or something? Always gave me a chuckle. As if saying that the DMCA does not apply for you is enough to make it actually so.
slantyyz 5y ago
> It seems like intuitions about copyright have been shifting, even if the law hasn't. I think people actually know it's wrong and legally questionable. I believe they do it because they simply want to do it and in the back of their minds, hope adding some bogus disclaimer will let them get away with it... because other people seem to be getting away with it.
- HWR_14 5y ago
  I think people think it's legally wrong but not morally wrong, and so they add a bogus disclaimer hoping that they can get away with it because other people have.

yumraj 5y ago

Probably they are employed at companies who are themselves violating GPL and have seen this being done there.

delusional 5y ago
How do you think companies end up violating GPL. Maybe sometimes it's a heartless executive, but a lot of enterprise software devs are completely unconcerned with licenses. If they can get their hands on it, the license doesn't matter.
- jermaustin1 5y ago
  I had a senior dev at a past job who did this constantly. And when it was found out how much he actually stole, our entire team was laid off and replaced by the company that did the audit. He just refused to believe that software licenses were real. That and I dont think he could actually code anything from scratch without stealing large swaths of code from open source repositories.
  - vkat 5y ago
    Copy/paste without attribution to license or permission is more blatant.
    - jermaustin1 5y ago
      Organizationally he was given free reign to do whatever he wanted, and that lead to the entire teams downfall. He canceled code reviews... for himself. Well, he actually stated, all code reviews go through him, thus he "code reviewed" his own code. I remember he was once a few weeks late on delivering a basic landing page, and when it finally got to QA at 9pm on a Friday, our entire team was forced to work the weekend and QA gave me a TFS export of more than 200 defects I had to fix because he was unreachable. Needless to say, our entire team was upset we all got laid off, but also relieved because we all ended up in better jobs. At least everyone I've talked to, which is everyone but him, as he has never responded to a single text message or email since he quit after the layoff (he refused severance, and just walked out), all his socials went off line, and any record of his name has disappeared from the internet. I'm fairly certain he was a conman, but I have no way of finding out.

SavantIdiot 5y ago

There are subtleties not captured by this quick overview which are not fully understood by (in my experience) the vast majority of programmers: https://choosealicense.com/licenses/ https://choosealicense.com/licenses/ If your project is going to be "real" (e.g., not some personal throwaway), you really need a lawyer if you are including anything other than MIT. Even Apache can be problematic when it comes to patenting.

gus_massa 5y ago
What about BSD?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- krylon 5y ago
  I am not a lawyer, but the (2-clause) BSD and MIT licenses look nearly identical to me. The wording is slightly different, but I think they express the same intent.

znpy 5y ago

> self-labelled software engineers are you implying there should be requirements to label yourself as an engineer? like a degree in engineering ?

vineyardmike 5y ago
This is already a thing in the US.

908B64B197 5y ago

I wish "software engineer" meant something. There are CMU/MIT grads using the tittle alongside 3 month bootcamp grads. I also have to wonder, with the owners of Tik Tok really being ByteDance (字节跳动) if the dissrespect for IP really isn't cultural.

paxys 5y ago
The title isn't what's important, it's your skills and what you can do with them. The MIT grad and 3 month bootcamp grad both have the same opportunity to complete and prove themselves, which is unique to the software field. Lack of artificial barriers and gatekeeping is the very reason why the industry is able to thrive.
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  But you get these twitter threads that are highly missleading. Would be great to have some quality control at some point. This doesn't make real engineers look good in the eyes of the public. Same thing with medical profesionnals spreading anti-vaxx news around.

koonsolo 5y ago

Maybe it's a generational thing. In the olden days, Open Source was basically GPL. But nowadays, Open Source is basically BSD. So I get it that all the npm developers don't really consider that some licenses might be restrictive.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

dang 5y ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29592556 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29592556.

viktorcode 5y ago

Most likely that's the reason of OBS' code ending up in TikTok's product. Some engineer disregarded the license with no insidious intention to steal.

mr_toad 5y ago
It’s even possible that the developer tried to get the product to be compliant and was ignored.