Slashdot Mirror
Sothink Violated the FlashGot GPL and Stole Code
ShineTheLight sends in news of two Firefox plug-ins: FlashGot, the original, and Sothink, the GPL-violating come-lately. "People at Sothink decided to violate the GPL by stealing a piece of core code from FlashGot and using it without even the decency of covering their tracks. It is an exact copy of a previous version of FlashGot. This deception came to light when users reported to the FlashGot support forum that their software was not working right. Some digging led to the discovery that the older module that Sothink stole and used verbatim was overriding the more recent engine on the machines of those who had both installed and it was causing the issue. It has been reported to AMO and the FlashGot developer is aware of it. The Sothink people have completely ignored and been silent on the subject. This is why most good programmers will stop contributing to the global community because there are those who will steal their work, pass it off as their own, never acknowledge or give credit, and then shamefully stick their head in the sand and ignore the consequences." The three most recent reviews of Sothink point out this plug-in's dishonest nature. A number of earlier, one-line, 5-star reviews — expressed in a similar style — sound suspiciously like astroturfing.
"People at Sothink decided to violate the GPL by stealing a piece of core code from FlashGot and using it without even the decency of covering their tracks."
Stealing? A digital artifact?
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
That's funny. From my personal experience, most of the really good programmers that I know _do_ contribute to open source. That's how they got to be really good programmers, in fact. They had the chance to do things right, rather than being pushed to meet some arbitrary marketing deadline, or simply being too busy fighting fires to spend time improving their skill.
At $employer[-1], we had a suite of software which put any commercial SRM suite to shame (not just my opinion -- we evaluated all the ones we could find, as we were being pushed to use a vendor-supported system), but it could have been much better if we'd had time to go in and clean up parts of it that had been written over a decade ago. On the open-source stuff I write, I don't _have_ that problem. I can do it right. (I also have that luxury at my current job, at least so far, which is _really_ nice.)
If all you're doing is writing the same sort of code the same way, you aren't going to improve your skills, at least not in a reasonable timeframe. You have to stretch yourself, _and_ you have to be exposed to better (or at least different) practices. You have to have people pointing out not just where you've done things wrong, but where you could have done them better, and even -- no, especially -- where you could have done things 'better', even though 'better' is a matter of opinion and theirs differs; having to defend _why_ you think your opinion is right makes you think about it. It certainly does me, anyway. Heck, sometimes I even change my mind!
I've found that the best way to get that sort of exposure and criticism is by contributing to open source software. At work, I'm being paid to get things done, not to sit and argue the merits of one approach over another if either is 'good enough'; a little of that is reasonable, because it helps make sure they _are_ both 'good enough', but at the end of the day, I'm being paid to produce, not study. I'm being paid to write software to get things done, in a manner that other people on the team can maintain, not learn Erlang or Haskell to broaden my understanding of programming.
And I think that's perfectly reasonable. Improving my programming skill benefits _me_ primarily, and my employer secondarily, just as exercise benefits me primarily (by improving my health) and my employer secondarily (by reducing the number of days missed to illness). They don't pay me to exercise, and they don't pay me to improve my programming skill. They pay me to get things done.
Why would you even download this? Their web page and blog looks like it was created from an SEO program for selling viagra.
And I noticed all of the 5-star reviews I've read are all in broken English. All of the 1-Star negative reviews are in perfect English. It's only a correlation, but it (the positive reviews) is an indicator of spam.