this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2024
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[–] [email protected] 223 points 7 months ago (19 children)

Reminder that this is made by Ben Zhao, the University of Chicago professor who stole open source code for his last data poisoning scheme.

[–] [email protected] 67 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Pardon my ignorance but how do you steal code if it's open source?

[–] [email protected] 223 points 7 months ago (1 children)

You don’t follow the license that it was distributed under.

Commonly, if you use open source code in your project and that code is under a license that requires your project to be open source if you do that, but then you keep yours closed source.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (3 children)

I still wouldn't call it stealing, but I guess "broke open source code licenses" doesn't have the same impact, but I'd prefer accuracy.

[–] [email protected] 90 points 7 months ago (2 children)

It’s piracy, distributing copyrighted works against the terms of its license. I agree stealing is not really the right word.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Nah piracy is with like boats.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 7 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago

And eyepatches and scimitars

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Distributing it would be one thing, but profiting off it?

[–] [email protected] 23 points 7 months ago

I think it makes the most sense to think of it like stealing the way plagiarism is stealing.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 7 months ago

I wouldn't call pirating stealing either so

[–] [email protected] 77 points 7 months ago (1 children)

He took GPLv3 code, which is a copyleft license that requires you share your source code and license your project under the same terms as the code you used. You also can't distribute your project as a binary-only or proprietary software. When pressed, they only released the code for their front end, remaining in violation of GPLv3.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Probably the reason they're moving to a Web offering. They could just take down the binary files and be gpl compliant, this whole thing is so stupid

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I think that's what AGPL tries to prevent

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Yes, but if the code they took is not AGPL then this loophole still applies

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Yes, I meant more that AGPL was created to plug this particular loophole. As in, if it was AGPL, they couldn't do this.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

That's true

Although I personally am not a fan of licences this strict, MIT+Apache2.0 seems good enough for me. Of course, that might change with time and precedents like this 😅

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