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From the article, "By definition, plagiarism only happens when credit to sources is not given, which was never the case with Rybka." I simply do not agree with
by wbhart 15y ago
From the article, "By definition, plagiarism only happens when credit to sources is not given, which was never the case with Rybka."
I simply do not agree with this. I cannot copy slabs of open source code, incorporate them into my product and pass if off as my own just because I somewhere credited the great performance of my program to stuff I learned from reading open source software.
To me, plagiarism is copying some portion of someone else's work and including it in a work which I (explicitly or implicitly) claim to be my own.
For example, a student handing in a wikipedia article for a homework assignment still commits plagiarism even if they credit wikipedia as a source but don't explicitly say the thing is a wikipedia article. They hand it in as their work when they did not write it. So at this point I do not feel I agree with the article. It's as though the argument is, yes he copied, but it's ok because he gave "credit", there were plenty of new ideas and everyone else was doing it too. That's not the same thing as, "he didn't commit plagiarism". The latter means he did not copy the code.
Having said that, I am absolutely gobsmacked that the committee did not simply ask for the source code to both programs, check that it in fact compiles to the binaries in question, then do a comparison for legally significant quantities of identical code.
It's even more remarkable when you realise that the version of Fruit involved was open source, so they didn't even need to ask for the source code to that!
Note: I edited the above in response to the comments below.
- sp332 15y agoI disagree. I think if a student turns in an assignment that's clearly and admittedly just a WP article, the student should not get credit for doing the work, but he didn't commit plagiarism.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- SeanLuke 15y agoI don't have an opinion on what this guy did and whether he should have been stripped, but you're redefining plagiarism pure and simple. Plagiarism is passing off someone else's ideas or expression of those ideas as if they were your own. And that's it. Plagiarism has nothing to do with whether you benefit from someone else's ideas illegally or unethically. Let's say that there's a competition to write an original novel. I take Moby Dick and change one sentence. Then I submit it with a big warning on the front cover that says: "This novel is Moby Dick with one sentence changed by me." I have violated the rules of the contest perhaps. If I win I maybe benefitted from it. But I have not committed plagiarism -- I did not pass off these ideas as if they were my own. It was made clear whose ideas they were.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- jsnell 15y agoWhat makes you think Rajlich would have given them source access, or that it wasn't asked for? By all accounts he was not willing to assist with the investigation in any way.
- crististm 15y agoI've read the report files. They based the findings on the behaviour of the Rybka binary. As the article says, Rajlich refused to show the source code.
- bambax 15y ago> Having said that, I am absolutely gobsmacked that the committee did not simply ask for the source code to both programs From the article (part 4): > Critics of the ICGA soon realized that no one has actual Rybka source code from before 2010, not even Rajlich himself, who sheepishly admitted to Nelson Hernandez off-camera in the course of their July 2011 video interview that he had never maintained any form of version control for Rybka source code until Rybka 4.