My colleague @Leoashin has been trolling his own blog these days asking me what deal TO choose. This reminds me of two things that happened to me earlier.

The first happened on Zhihu, when I was invited to answer a question: what if someone copied an open source App into the iOS App Store?

What happened is that @Coderyi developed an open source player named ElevenPlayer, which was released on The App Store on September 21st last year. Unexpectedly, it was copied by seven people, whose functions and visuals are almost the same. One player ranked 70th in total and one ranked 21st in paid category.

For this situation, most of the students are supportive attitude. Since I have denounced all kinds of plagiarism and piracy incidents in the major network platforms before, I naturally want to support them this time. But when I looked at the author’s open-source code on Github, I was a little confused.

So I wrote in Zhihu:

Say something the author doesn’t like to hear.

The code originally uses the MIT License, which should be the least restrictive protocol for users. Consumers can close source distribution, and code can be commercialized. That is, if all you need is an original agreement.

But if others promote well, or modify well, the original author may not benefit from it.

I looked at the author’s code base and looked at the code submission history, and several of the comments read: “For some reason the work changed from MIT to CC Attribution-Noncommercial.” It seems that the author is aware of the problem and has temporarily changed the protocol, but that doesn’t work because developers can still re-develop the code.

So be careful when choosing an open source license.

Do you remember the history of MacOS and BSD?

When Apple saw BSD as an excellent open source system, they were impressed:

The source code can be changed.

You can close the source. Okay, I’ll close the source.

Commercially available. Wow, just what I wanted.

Most irritating of all, the modified MacOS is prettier and easier to use than BSD.

This is fucking embarrassing. This is fucking embarrassing. This is fucking embarrassing.

So let’s go back and look at the software that the author developed, is it 100% original? Obviously not, the author used ffMPEG, KxMovie, YiRefresh and other open source code, because I did not download and install the author of this APP, also do not evaluate whether the author in accordance with the open source agreement to use these open source code. However, from the author’s understanding of open source, the author should “violate” the use of these open source code.

What exactly is the MIT License I mentioned above?

A License is a copyright License that specifies what rights you have when you acquire the code, what you can and cannot do with someone else’s work. The common open source software protocols are GPL, BSD, MIT, Mozilla, Apache, and LGPL.

Which License should YOU choose? Ukrainian programmer Paul Bagwell drew an analysis diagram (below is the Chinese version of Ruan Yifeng)

Here’s a more comprehensive and slightly mischievous image, translated by @flniu from Diycode:

The second thing happened on v2Ex, with the title: Someone just copied my code instead of forking it! .

I was dumbstruck by the headline – can’t it!! ?? (Black question.jpg)

The previous development of the family relationship calculator unexpectedly let people directly copy away… Simply speechless, open source can casually come? Direct code copy away, put their own repository into their own…

????

Isn’t it? !

The key is! Why is the only submission that shows up is mine? However, the interface shows that the fork is not mine. Is github wrong? Will the fork break the relationship?

The author’s “kinship Calculator” is really good, and I’ve used it too. We should admire this kind of developer. But the author’s comments reveal that he does not understand open source at all. Of course, I chose to put my code on Github or other open source communities, and when others star or fork my code, I feel good about my efforts.

What is wrong with the so-called “copycat”? The answer is, nothing.

The “copycat” did not tamper with any of the original author’s commit records, nor did the LICENSE and copyright information.

Many people think that by opening source code on Github they are promoting themselves, and find out that others are doing something better with their code than they are. They put their code on Github waiting for someone else to star, wait for someone else to fork, but when someone else uses the code and doesn’t fork it, it’s not balanced.

So do open source, first set a good attitude.