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Comment by meepmorp | Hacker News Reader

What I find sad about that anecdote is that he fully and freely admits stealing software features from other places to make a more serviceable piece of software, and that doing so now and owning up to it would get you an automatic loss in a patent suit.*

* Yes, I know this is a bit of an oversimplification.

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To me, stealing is taking someone else's brand, renaming it, and selling it as your own. By that definition, this case is not stealing. It reminds me of the saying "everything that can be invented, has been invented" (I do not remotely believe this) BUT, the man looked at all the best features of the existing inventions and bundled them up into one, and made the best one yet. In fact, he did such a swell job, we still debate, discuss, and use his invention today. /Think stackoverflow's about page...

Surely that's trademark infringement, which is a variety of FRAUD, a completely different thing.

Stealing, for me, is taking someone else's _stuff_, and arguments about IP law come down to arguments over the definition of "stuff" and who "owns" it.

I think that's a bit doom and gloom. We now have github, it's easier than ever before to copy code and release it as your own.

Yeah, like, I don't know, 1-click shopping and multitasking on your smartphone ;)?

What exactly has github contributed to code accessibility? (that FreeBSD's ports system didn't do 15 years ago)

Popularity and accessibility itself. Real, normal people have heard of, and use, Github.

Real, normal people? I wish it were true but in my experience github is just another source code repository.

As for BSD a search of my (partial) ports tree finds 19326 Makefiles of which 102 contain the string github. Thats 0.5 percent, which tends to argue against your claim.

That's just the easiest measure I have at hand. Would be interested in others and their findings.

Real, normal people?

I don't mean my mom, but I do mean to imply (without evidence) ordinary non-Norvig coders who aren't steeped in Unix lore.

Does ports really do what Github does, or does it do what apt/rpm/yum/pacman/etc do?

It's been a few years since I've been a regular (Free)BSD user, but I think github has a very different use case.

The ports tree is for handling distribution of compilable/installable software for the platform, and you synch it from a server, then build. It's not really intended to promote the branching and modification, and social aspects that github does.

I largely agree with your points about branching but less so about modification. It's easy to submit patches though they do go through a sometimes rigorous code review. Does github have a formal mechanism for code reviews? Does that differ from Sourceforge, Google Code or other source repositories <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open_source_softw...?

Nothing of course, but if you are young and dont know about sourceforge or any code search engines what else are you going to think? Today's github boosters will be shaking their heads 10 years from now when they hear someone make the same claims about thenextnewforgehub.

Patents don't require copying for liability to exist. Are you talking about copyright?

Unless he was stealing actual source code from ed or bravo, or literally reprinting the manuals themselves, nothing described would run afoul of copyright.

Right, my point was more along the lines of a hypothetical patent on the idea of "an method for editing text on a computer in a text oriented way," and that admitting that you'd seen and borrowed from another program would be a huge mistake today, rather than just acknowledging he did what good programmers do.

I think he means copy of functionality. I doubt Bill Joy ever copied actual code.

Quite a bit of a simplification, since 1) Lotus v. Borland established that this sort of copying was legitimate and 2) this would be a copyright issue, and not a patent one.

I was thinking of a hypothetical patent on "a method for editing text on a computer in a screen oriented manner."

Which is absurd and obviously something that shouldn't be patentable, but in my view, so is 1-click shopping on a website.

Point taken. I wonder if Lotus could have patented their menu assignments.

...and this is why we can't have nice things: an article about a part of computing history immediately turns into ideologically-inspired dead horse flogging, complete with an admission that the argument made actually bullshit - but hey, let's post anyway.

... and this is why we can't have nice things: when people point out how the computing world's ability to innovate is being destroyed it is immediately attacked as supposed ideology. This attitude, that we can't talk about controversial topics among nice company, is what allows our rights to be stolen.

Nobody said you can't talk about controversial topics. They merely pointed out that this thread is not about a controversial topic, and that off-topic controversy tends to derail otherwise interesting threads. If you insist on trying to tie barely-related threads into a particular topic, that's called having an axe to grind, and it is an ideological thing. (Not that I mean to accuse meepmorp of this. He/she has agreed that it's not germane.)

I think it's fair to point out that a part of computing history might never of happened today, owing to the current legal situation w.r.t. software patents. And owning up to stealing is unthinkable, despite the fact that we all do it.

That said, I am sorry for bringing up software patents, cause usually the topic generates more heat than light, and I hate reading the inevitable screeds, too. It was early, I'd had no coffee, and the brain wasn't working.

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