3 ms·

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 conside

by 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.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    Well, for me the bar for plagiarism is apparently higher than for you, for me it is 'passing something off as your own' and that never happened here. I'm open to other definitions that I'm not currently aware of.
    - foldr 3y ago
      The commit log and associated metadata misrepresent the authorship of the code. I am using the bar that you can find by googling 'plagiarism policy' and reading any number of documents explaining what constitutes plagiarism in an academic context. Plagiarism is not a crime, so the kernel maintainers can choose to decide that it's socially acceptable in the context of kernel development if they want to.
      - jacquesm 3y ago
        I think you just relegated a very large chunk of the Linux kernel to plagiarism.
        foldr 3y ago
        I'm not sure if I'd agree with a 'very large chunk', but certainly I don't think this is an isolated incident. It's just that people don't usually make a fuss.
        jacquesm 3y ago
        I think the basic issue stems from the fact that LKML sees patches as 'proposals' unless they can be included as is without further work. And any would-be contributor would be (heh) able to see that for themselves by looking at the many years of documented interaction between maintainers and the general public. These long running projects all have their own styles and conventions for interaction (LKML itself being one of those) and the onus is on newcomers to familiarize themselves with that. Authorship, especially in the context of a project of this magnitude and with so many different people maintaining different parts of it is always going to be somewhat nebulous, because after all, you're changing a tiny little bit in a huge machine and anything worthy of copyright is usually expected to stand alone as a 'work'. That's definitely not the case here. And so the sign-off becomes a critical bit, if you omit that then you've just created a problem for the maintainer. Personally, I would never expect to be named author of a patch sent to the kernel mailing list, but if I wrote a sizeable subsystem then I would definitely expect that kind of recognition. For patches like this your pay-off is the fact that they are taken into consideration at all.

by foldr 3y ago

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.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  Well, for me the bar for plagiarism is apparently higher than for you, for me it is 'passing something off as your own' and that never happened here. I'm open to other definitions that I'm not currently aware of.
  - foldr 3y ago
    The commit log and associated metadata misrepresent the authorship of the code. I am using the bar that you can find by googling 'plagiarism policy' and reading any number of documents explaining what constitutes plagiarism in an academic context. Plagiarism is not a crime, so the kernel maintainers can choose to decide that it's socially acceptable in the context of kernel development if they want to.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      I think you just relegated a very large chunk of the Linux kernel to plagiarism.
      - foldr 3y ago
        I'm not sure if I'd agree with a 'very large chunk', but certainly I don't think this is an isolated incident. It's just that people don't usually make a fuss.
        jacquesm 3y ago
        I think the basic issue stems from the fact that LKML sees patches as 'proposals' unless they can be included as is without further work. And any would-be contributor would be (heh) able to see that for themselves by looking at the many years of documented interaction between maintainers and the general public. These long running projects all have their own styles and conventions for interaction (LKML itself being one of those) and the onus is on newcomers to familiarize themselves with that. Authorship, especially in the context of a project of this magnitude and with so many different people maintaining different parts of it is always going to be somewhat nebulous, because after all, you're changing a tiny little bit in a huge machine and anything worthy of copyright is usually expected to stand alone as a 'work'. That's definitely not the case here. And so the sign-off becomes a critical bit, if you omit that then you've just created a problem for the maintainer. Personally, I would never expect to be named author of a patch sent to the kernel mailing list, but if I wrote a sizeable subsystem then I would definitely expect that kind of recognition. For patches like this your pay-off is the fact that they are taken into consideration at all.