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If I submit a patch and a maintainer (or anyone else) reads it and writes their own based on it, then they have edited my work. If they don’t attribute me at al

If I submit a patch and a maintainer (or anyone else) reads it and writes their own based on it, then they have edited my work. If they don’t attribute me at all, then they are plagiarizing. Maybe there is no law to protect me, but it’s social contract.

arghwhat 3y ago
If it was taken verbatim, sure - while perfectly fine under the license, that would be a dick move. But you should also note that the commit contains an additional essay or two's worth of analysis and justification, and includes test sign-off from other people. Even if you disregard the difference in code, the difference in commits is huge. And as mentioned elsewhere, this issue was submitted to security@, triggering a machine optimized solely for resolving issues quickly and correctly for the safety of the user-base, and not one suited for training new contributors. If this was submitted normally, it's quite likely that this would have gotten merged after an iteration or two - which could easily have taken a week or more.
- bluGill 3y ago
  Just because the patch was urgent is not an excuse for not giving proper credit. Co-author appears to be the minimum credit.
guenthert 3y ago
There are typically multiple ways to write code to address a given issue. They might differ in aesthetics (including clarity of intend), but also performance, maintainability, extensibility and robustness. It's not uncommon that those who wrote the code to be fixed rewrite the patch in order to improve on aforementioned properties while avoiding lengthy back-and-forth when asking for improvement of the patch. They are often in a better position to do so due to familiarity with the code, it's history and (unwritten) development path. That is by no means plagiarism. If not communicated clearly, can however lead to disappointment of those who submitted the patch. An 'inspired-by' comment would have been nice.
- fleshdaddy 3y ago
  Yeah it just seems like a bad strategy on the maintainers part. Seems like one of those perfect places to teach a new contributor style guides and make them more useful in the future. To me approaching it this way comes off as disinterest in welcoming new contributors, which maybe now they’re not needed, but being so unwelcoming could one day leave us with no one capable of maintaining these projects.
- foldr 3y ago
  It is plagiarism by definition if you don’t give credit to the person who wrote the original patch. Paraphrasing a source without citing it is certainly considered plagiarism in non-programming contexts (even if you think that you improved the prose style).
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    A patch, by definition is a modification of an existing piece of code, in this case a very small one. Now, it is possible that copyright protection would apply to such a small piece of code in that context but plagiarism usually does not involve a perfect record (the mailing list where the patch was submitted) that states exactly where the original work was submitted, what was done to it to make it ready for inclusion as well as an admonishment that the patch was not usable because it wasn't properly signed off. Plagiarism means that the kernel maintainer included the code and pretended that it was their original creation and nothing of the sort happened so I don't think that word should be used in this context. Nobody doubts the OP wrote the code, nobody is saying that they did not and nobody passes it off as their own.
    - foldr 3y ago
      Misrepresenting your level of reliance on a particular source is plagiarism, and is uncontroversially recognized as such in any other context. If I say that I was inspired to study a particular problem by Paper X, but don't mention that my own paper includes several copied paragraphs of Paper X that I've lightly edited, then that is plagiarism. If there is a public record that makes it obvious that you've plagiarised, then that doesn't mean you're not guilty of plagiarism. It just means you failed to cover your tracks. None of this has anything to do with copyright. Not all plagiarism involves copyright violations and not all copyright violations are instances of plagiarism.
PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
The maintainer is responsible for quality and correctness. I don't know the specifics of this patch, but it's absolutely not strange for a maintainer to make changes with these goals in mind. Hell, maintainers are usually more aware of broader concerns than the contributor.
- Arnavion 3y ago
  I don't know the specifics of the patch either since OP has not linked their patch nor the final kernel commit. I don't understand why being a private list would be a problem since they can just post their patch on their website. Maybe they're waiting for the fix to hit mainline first. But when someone submits a patch to any of my OSS projects and I want to make modifications to it before I merge it, I either keep the original author as the Author and make myself as Co-Authored-By, or make myself the Author and keep the original author as Co-Authored-By, depending on how much change I had to make to the original patch. In either case I also have the original author review my version to get their approval of my version. The only case where I would not credit the original author at all (or only as Reported-By) is if my version had absolutely nothing to do with their patch, say they fixed the symptom in file X and I fixed the cause in file Y. Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37674872 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37674872 found the patches. If it was my project I'd consider these in the Author/Co-Authored-By category because they're basically the same patch.

arghwhat 3y ago

If it was taken verbatim, sure - while perfectly fine under the license, that would be a dick move. But you should also note that the commit contains an additional essay or two's worth of analysis and justification, and includes test sign-off from other people. Even if you disregard the difference in code, the difference in commits is huge. And as mentioned elsewhere, this issue was submitted to security@, triggering a machine optimized solely for resolving issues quickly and correctly for the safety of the user-base, and not one suited for training new contributors. If this was submitted normally, it's quite likely that this would have gotten merged after an iteration or two - which could easily have taken a week or more.

bluGill 3y ago
Just because the patch was urgent is not an excuse for not giving proper credit. Co-author appears to be the minimum credit.

guenthert 3y ago

There are typically multiple ways to write code to address a given issue. They might differ in aesthetics (including clarity of intend), but also performance, maintainability, extensibility and robustness. It's not uncommon that those who wrote the code to be fixed rewrite the patch in order to improve on aforementioned properties while avoiding lengthy back-and-forth when asking for improvement of the patch. They are often in a better position to do so due to familiarity with the code, it's history and (unwritten) development path. That is by no means plagiarism. If not communicated clearly, can however lead to disappointment of those who submitted the patch. An 'inspired-by' comment would have been nice.

fleshdaddy 3y ago
Yeah it just seems like a bad strategy on the maintainers part. Seems like one of those perfect places to teach a new contributor style guides and make them more useful in the future. To me approaching it this way comes off as disinterest in welcoming new contributors, which maybe now they’re not needed, but being so unwelcoming could one day leave us with no one capable of maintaining these projects.
foldr 3y ago
It is plagiarism by definition if you don’t give credit to the person who wrote the original patch. Paraphrasing a source without citing it is certainly considered plagiarism in non-programming contexts (even if you think that you improved the prose style).
- jacquesm 3y ago
  A patch, by definition is a modification of an existing piece of code, in this case a very small one. Now, it is possible that copyright protection would apply to such a small piece of code in that context but plagiarism usually does not involve a perfect record (the mailing list where the patch was submitted) that states exactly where the original work was submitted, what was done to it to make it ready for inclusion as well as an admonishment that the patch was not usable because it wasn't properly signed off. Plagiarism means that the kernel maintainer included the code and pretended that it was their original creation and nothing of the sort happened so I don't think that word should be used in this context. Nobody doubts the OP wrote the code, nobody is saying that they did not and nobody passes it off as their own.
  - foldr 3y ago
    Misrepresenting your level of reliance on a particular source is plagiarism, and is uncontroversially recognized as such in any other context. If I say that I was inspired to study a particular problem by Paper X, but don't mention that my own paper includes several copied paragraphs of Paper X that I've lightly edited, then that is plagiarism. If there is a public record that makes it obvious that you've plagiarised, then that doesn't mean you're not guilty of plagiarism. It just means you failed to cover your tracks. None of this has anything to do with copyright. Not all plagiarism involves copyright violations and not all copyright violations are instances of plagiarism.

PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago

The maintainer is responsible for quality and correctness. I don't know the specifics of this patch, but it's absolutely not strange for a maintainer to make changes with these goals in mind. Hell, maintainers are usually more aware of broader concerns than the contributor.

Arnavion 3y ago
I don't know the specifics of the patch either since OP has not linked their patch nor the final kernel commit. I don't understand why being a private list would be a problem since they can just post their patch on their website. Maybe they're waiting for the fix to hit mainline first. But when someone submits a patch to any of my OSS projects and I want to make modifications to it before I merge it, I either keep the original author as the Author and make myself as Co-Authored-By, or make myself the Author and keep the original author as Co-Authored-By, depending on how much change I had to make to the original patch. In either case I also have the original author review my version to get their approval of my version. The only case where I would not credit the original author at all (or only as Reported-By) is if my version had absolutely nothing to do with their patch, say they fixed the symptom in file X and I fixed the cause in file Y. Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37674872 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37674872 found the patches. If it was my project I'd consider these in the Author/Co-Authored-By category because they're basically the same patch.