The ethics of "trojaning" vs. stealing code.

Posted Feb 24, 2003 2:03 UTC (Mon) by Duncan (guest, #6647)
In reply to: The trojaning of mICQ by Steve_Baker
Parent article: The trojaning of mICQ

<quote>
Regardless of his so called "childishness", Debian made the greater error in
removing his name from the copyright file. That is not excusable, and his later
actions do not change the fact that Debian owes him an apology.
</quote>

Initially, I was asking myself what sort of irresponsible general maintainer this was,
to do what he did.

Then I realized the truth of the above. His name wasn't in the copyright file, so he
had every reason to assume none of his code would be in their version anyway.
Thus, he could write whatever he wanted and it wouldn't see the light of day,
because it wouldn't be triggered by being in their distribution, because they would
have removed it as code from someone not in the copyright file, rather than stealing
from him, which taking his code without attribution is, in effect.

Looked at it that way, all he did was prove that they were stealing his code, while at
the same time demonstrating a VERY important point about what he COULD have
done, the dangers that existed if someone were to exploit them, because the Debian
maintainer wasn't doing HIS job, but rather, was stealing from someone else, without
even crediting him for his contribution.

It's going farther than I would have. That's not my nature. However, I certainly
don't blame the general maintainer for doing what he did, because, indeed, he had
every reason to believe in good faith that none of his code was being included
anyway, because after all, the Debian maintainer certainly wasn't THAT unethical,
and CERTAINLY wouldn't include code stolen without attribution, would he?