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Admin
As the old saying goes, "The open source that bears the boat is the same that swallows it up."
Admin
Yes, but what bears have to do with open source? :>
Admin
Isn't this obvious? Greg managed to plagiarize someone else's library because it's open source, and he got rooted out very quickly also because it's open source.
Admin
Very. I'm nevertheless confused about the bears. Why are these poor animals in a boat? Why is now there a library on a boat? :>
Admin
What, you don't think sailors have the right to read? Where do you think Moby Dick came from, or The Narrative Of Arthur Gordon Pym?
Admin
What's not to get? To many people Open Source appears dangerous. Bears are dangerous. Therefore, Open Source is a bear. But not only that; Open Source is also a shark, crack in a glacier, nuclear weapons, and LEGO bricks strewn across a floor at night.
Admin
Everything takes from something. There's barely anything which is completely original. Plagiarism is a total joke because that's not how the real world actually works.
Admin
Why didn't the guy replace "Wren" with "Magpie"? At least THAT might have given the interview team a laugh before they rejected him...
Admin
People think they're so clever, acting like they're the first ones to have come up with plagiarism.
Admin
Certainly. Ishmael was an educated fellow and lo, he alone survived. The Open Mind must have been what kept him above the water.
Admin
Is this really plagiarism? Forking repos is what Github is all about. Maybe he meant his other projects: Marissa may have thought them "nothing special", but perhaps he was proud of them.
Admin
There's a difference between, say, adapting a snippet of example code from some blog or Stackoverflow, and lifting someone else's code entirely and trying to pass it off as your own. The line between inspiration and plagiarism is really a matter of degree and intent.
Personally, if I swipe some code from somewhere, I like to credit it with a link in a comment, mostly so other folks looking at the code (or me later) can get more context on it.
Admin
I don't get it. The story doesn't say he claimed iStarling as an accomplishment. To me, he just forked iWren, and hadn't yet put in a credit to the original. This is bad how?
Admin
Forking an open source repo is normal and fine.
Replacing one word in it in order to re-brand it as your own is strange, but not actually illegal either. In fact, if you are going to fork the project permanently and develop something based on it, re-branding it should be the first thing that you do.
Trying to pass off the existing code as your own in order to ace a job interview is highly unethical. But actually, nothing in the article as written says that is what he did. There were other code projects in there too.
So yeah. Either this article is incomplete, or the company jumped the gun on calling out plagiarism.
Admin
It's a saying: https://en.bab.la/dictionary/english-chinese/the-water-that-bears-the-boat-is-the-same-that-swallows-it-up
Admin
That reminds me of another saying: "Woooooosh".
Admin
He should have called it iCanary. It was certainly the canary in the coalmine for anyone looking to hire him.
Admin
If you fork on Github, there’s an automatic link back to the parent - a bit hard to miss
Admin
Are you sure? Doesn’t R&D stand for Rob and Deploy?
Admin
Well, that is a sterling picture of a starling. Sadly, the only USA starling looks nothing like that.
Admin
FFS, spoilers.
Admin
Nowhere the article states it was a fork. Assumptions are the mother of all f***-ups.
Of course, the real WTF is not changing birdiebird before creating a new repo so it doesn't show up in version history.
Admin
I have almost stopped commenting. The silliness of these articles makes me wonder, where is TDWTF headed.
Admin
Greg has a great future ahead of him as part of an outsourced software contracting firm.
Admin
If you can honestly say you were meaning to read it sometime soon-ish(tm), I'm honestly sorry :<
@Nagesh: Apologies! My senseless trolling leaked yesterday from the forums. Not unlike a boat with lots of bears in it...
Admin
Well, it was a fork by definition. He copied all the code to a new repository. That's called a fork and it's totally legal provided you adhere to the terms of the original licence.
If Greg copied all the code and did a find/replace on iWren, all the original copyright notices, attributions, acknowledgements, licenses and warranty disclaimers would have been unchanged which means likely that he has not broken the terms of the licence. Unless he tried to pass off that project as "all his own work", he did nothing wrong here.
Admin
At the place I currently work, we give small tests to potential candidates. One test is like those basic Fizz Buzz logic problems, just to see how you go about writing your code. It's not a unique test we wrote, so there are answers online if your Google-fu is up to par.
One candidate completely copied their solution from someone else GitHub repo. When I say completely, I mean completely, leaving in the original programmers name in the namespaces of each class. Obviously, we turned them down, but we did ask why they did this. Their answer: they didn't copy it from anywhere, it was all their own code.
Yeah, some people do just copy code and try to pass it off as their own.
Admin
I partially disagree.
A fork is a copy, yes. But a copy is not a fork per se.
If you download the source code, create a new repo from scratch and then commit 'your' new project files, it will not have any of the linkage a git fork would normally have. Of course, in a search, any of 'your' code would show up together with the original exactly the same, but it would not show any form of cutlery inheritance.
But it is a copy. If you insist, you could still technically call it a fork and feel free to do so. It however would not be recognized by git as such.
Admin
You have a boat, a goat, a wolf, a magpie, a fork, and a bear in a boat. Create a library to access Github and copy the fork to the interviewer's table. Sort the table to match the order of books in the library. See the african coconut cross the sea in opposite direction. Review xkcd #1134. Describe the universe. Provide two examples. Greg pro quo, agent iStarling.
Admin
There's no such thing as a "git fork". The concept of a fork has nothing to do with git, and existed long, long before git did. The use of "fork" specifically in relation to git was, as far as I can tell, invented (or at least popularised) by GitHub solely so they could make fork/fuck puns.
Admin
Someone doesn't know how code is forked... Also, it's a new grad we are talking about here, how impressive do you expect their code to be? The mere fact they have GitHub projects is impressive enough.
Admin
What makes it plagiarism is not crediting sources. The standard way to fork on Github shows the upstream repo. This guy deliberately avoided doing that. He probably also either removed/edited the original copyright notices or was too incompetent to do so.
It's clearly an attempt to pass off the code as his own, and considering the timing is clearly an attempt to do so to deceive the interviewer.
Admin
I'm not sure who invented those puns, but they at least date back to the work on unix back in 1969. I expect they were probably fairly ancient even at that point.