this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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I think you should see something.

Like I mentioned many time before, this isn't my first attempt at creating an aggregator. Years ago, I built something similar, and back then I drew a lot of inspiration from Postmill. This time, to avoid starting from scratch, I get some elements from my old snippets. Originally, kbin was meant to be a project just for me and a few friends, so I didn't attribute the origin authors. That's not an excuse, though — I should have done it right away when the project became public on git. I have a point in my roadmap called "Preparing a repository for contributors," where I allocated a significant amount of time to educate myself about licenses, attributions, and so on. Unfortunately, everything unfolded in the wrong order.

https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/196

I think Emma is right. Since I share my small successes with you, I also want to be transparent about my failures and mistakes. I will push the proper attributions to the repository today along with some critical fixes.

To avoid reinventing the wheel, I took some code used in federation from Pixelfed as well. Essentially, there are two projects two projects will be marked. However, I have never concealed this fact:

https://kbin.social/m/random/p/254858/The-real-reason-why-I-haven-t-published-the-pixelfed-app#post-comment-438684

I mean that I'm not a guy who wants to steal your code. It's obvious that someone will take a look at the code of a project that is very similar to theirs. Sometimes, I just become terribly messy when I have to do many things at once. This lesson will definitely teach me to prioritize tasks better.

In the end, I can only promise that once everything settles down and I manage to extract a library for ActivityPub, I will revisit the Postmill repository, this time with a pull request proposal.

You should definitely check it out.

https://postmill.xyz/ - Project page
https://raddle.me/ - Postmill instance
https://pixelfed.org/ - Of course, everyone here is familiar with this one ;)

PS. the website should be running a bit faster. I will talk about it next time.

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[–] anthoniix@kbin.social 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I honestly don't see this as a big deal, but I'm glad that you're being honest and open. Attribution is cool and all, but Emma makes it sound like you committed some sort of cardinal sin. I can never understand why someone who uses a permissive license gets so upset when their work is not attributed, you gain almost nothing from it.

Again though, attribution is still a net good. I think it's the polite thing to do, and I'm glad you're doing it.

[–] sab@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

When you ask for very little (credit for your hard work), it's even more infuriating when you're deprived of it. You could compare it to stealing ideas in academia - the omission of one tiny reference makes a huge difference.

That said, there is such a thing as a honest mistake, and Ernest is handling it in the best way possible. But there are enough instances of permissive licences being abused that I don't blame the original author for initially taking it badly.

[–] 0x1C3B00DA@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago

I agree these things are a big deal for the original author, but you also have to consider what the other party is doing with your work. The tone of that issue is pretty hostile when a simple issue saying could you grant me proper attribution would have worked just as well. Ernest isn't a large company trying to profit of their work, he's just one dude. He was building a small project for just himself and released without clearing up his attributions. Its a small mistake that's easily rectified and didn't need to be so hostile.

[–] anthoniix@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

That's fair, I guess I just view it differently. For me what I actually care about is copyleft. If someone says they used something I made I couldn't care less. At the end of the day I care if it's open source, if it's not then we have a problem.