DMCA notice against oh-my-fish

https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2015-09-22-wahoo.md

by dvcrn • 11 years ago

53 73 11 years ago

striking4• 11 years ago

The DMCA is finally protecting the people it is meant to protect: content creators that otherwise were powerless against people who stole work.

And to people who say this could have been solved more amicably in a different way: This is obviously being used as a last resort in this case. Obviously all other avenues of resolution have been exhausted.

irl_zebra2• 11 years ago

I'm not sure I would go that far in this case. The licence of Wahoo is as follows:

"Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software."

To me, that means anyone can fork it and do whatever they want with it, as long as they keep that copyright notice intact.

tinco2• 11 years ago

To me, that means anyone can fork it and do whatever they want with it, as long as they keep that copyright notice intact.

Which they didn't, and that's why this is a great reason to file a DMCA.

striking4• 11 years ago

The copyright notice was missing that person's name.

charles20134• 11 years ago

Obviously all other avenues of resolution have been exhausted.

could you elaborate? it's not clear to me what other avenues of resolution were attempted.

striking4• 11 years ago

Soon after the merge and due to conflicts with @bpinto regarding the direction of the project and other issues, we decided to not continue working together and ended our relationship
@bpinto has continued to use the entire "wahoo" source code without my consent and expelled me from oh-my-fish organization. They also failed to state "oh-my-fish" is a complete copy of "wahoo" or provide copyright attribution since our separation.

They've clearly had some (admittedly non-specific) history. It looks like long talks were had, with little or no progress. Make what you will of this, but it seems a DMCA is the only way that this could be taken care of.

kardos2• 11 years ago

Err, is that how DMCA works? Can the copyright owner retroactively change conditions of the license [1]?

[1] https://github.com/wa/wahoo/blob/master/LICENSE

lcswi• 11 years ago

Nope

radlad3• 11 years ago

Permission is hereby granted [...] and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

In his DMCA notice on Github, the author states that the copyright was not left intact. I'm not certain whether he can void the whole license for "oh-my-fish" because of that or not.

Ensorceled• 11 years ago

That's exactly what the "subject to the following conditions" means. They have no right to use the code if the copyright notice provisions are not followed, following those conditions are what gives you the right to use the code.

If I give a license to use my code on the condition you pay me money, if you don't pay you also don't get to use my code.

tinco2• 11 years ago

You missed a crucial part of the license:

    subject to the following conditions:

    The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
    copies or substantial portions of the Software.

In the DMCA it's stated that his copyright is not credited, so they are in violation of MIT. If it's true that's a pretty low blow, it's so easy to use MIT code in a compliant way.

kardos2• 11 years ago

Ah, missed that, thanks.

linksbro5• 11 years ago

If oh-my-fish didn't include the copyright and reproduction notice outlined in the MIT license, then yes, this is how the DMCA works.

However, the author cannot enforce that they don't use the 'wahoo' repo. If oh-my-fish attributes correctly, and includes wahoo's license, then they can use it.

sethherr• 11 years ago

Github issue discussion: https://github.com/wa/wahoo/issues/95

zaphar• 11 years ago

He said/He Said blah blah blah.

TLDR: Oh My Fish got replaced by Wahoo. But rather than start a new project and declare Oh My Fish unsupported they replaced the Oh My Fish code in the repo with Wahoo code. Breaking userspace in the process, and thus starting them on the path that caused all this drama.

At least that is what appeared to happen according to that thread.

matheweis• 11 years ago

Also this: https://gitter.im/fishline/fin

And this: https://github.com/derekstavis/diary-of-a-stolen-repository

This is about a lot more than the MIT license. Folks, be clear about the copyright assignment of code that you contribute to projects, and project admins, keep an eye on those copyrights.

knodi1232• 11 years ago

Without additional context, it appears this is just some high school drama going on in a relatively minor project? I mean, yeah, clearly the MIT License would seem to be at odds with his stated reasoning...

But this is not a war between companies. It's just some young guy who decided to let his friends clone his project, and then he had a falling out with them, so he unilaterally tried to un-clone it and use the DMCA to do so? Childish, and maybe it will succeed and maybe it won't.... but it's just one doofus on a nothing project....

irl_zebra2• 11 years ago

Looks like it has already been taken down, according to the links. So looks like it did succeed, at least for now.

masklinn• 11 years ago

Looks like it has already been taken down

IIRC that's effectively a requirement of DMCA takedown requests. In theory the host can refuse to execute a compliant DMCA notice but that means they become party and lose their safe harbour exemption. Most OSPs don't really bother validating notices at all.

Tzadeck6• 11 years ago

Before Wahoo, the DMCA filer worked as an OMF core member, and months later created Wahoo, which is a totally different project. Eventually all collaborators decided to reunite, and the code base was completely replaced with wahoo, sans the name, but due to "disagreements" they split. The project actually has a long history.

ncr100• 11 years ago

So ... Companies rights are more important than individuals?

GFK_of_xmaspast• 11 years ago

Is this your first day in the modern western world.

knodi1232• 11 years ago

No, I'm not saying that at all. What I'm saying is that drama involving about 4 or 5 people is not very important to the rest of the world. If I create a github project containing my favorite vim color scheme, and then I get in an argument with a friend and try to have his fork deleted, will everyone on hacker news talk about me too?

dfranke• 11 years ago

Although this takedown notice evidences some... confusion... about how open source is supposed to work, it looks to me like the target actually did infringe the filer's copyright by stripping his name off the copyright headers, which is the one thing that the MIT license doesn't allow.

chrisdew• 11 years ago

Didn't they give everyone a license to copy their work?

(Due to the DCMA takedown, I can't see whether they honoured the MIT copyright condition.)

https://github.com/wa/wahoo/blob/master/LICENSE

... Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. ...

linksbro5• 11 years ago

They did, under the condition that "above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software."

If oh-my-fish didn't include the copyright notice and permission notice for wahoo's code they were using, then this is a valid use of the DMCA.

MIT doesn't mean you're free to use with abandon. You still have to credit and provide the license.

azurelogic2• 11 years ago

What are the broader implications of this with respect to the rather permissive nature of the MIT license? I mean, it grants users the ability to outright copy the code, provided that they include a copy of the license. If oh-my-fish included the copyright notice, then regardless of any disagreement between the repo owners, it seems that the author of wahoo has no ground to stand on here. Can someone explain otherwise?

linksbro5• 11 years ago

You are correct. If oh-my-fish properly included the copyright and permission notice of the MIT license, then they are within the bounds of the license. It doesn't matter what the author's requests are, they can use it if they attribute properly. Of course, the author can henceforth change the license for any future code, preventing any unauthorized forks, which would be against then open-source spirit of the MIT license.

azurelogic2• 11 years ago

Thanks for validating my logic. I wanted to make sure that there wasn't some major gotcha in the MIT license that I missed.

TallGuyShort5• 11 years ago

So many comments are focusing on the MIT license. That is the license that applies if you obtain it via Github and redistribute it.

But this...

> On August 26, 2015, I, @bucaran, and "oh-my-fish" collaborators, led by @bpinto, decided to replace the entire source code of "oh-my-fish!" with the entire source code of "wahoo", but keeping the "oh-my-fish" name.

... sounds like giving he consented to give ownership of the code to the oh-my-fish project, and is retroactively trying to apply the terms of the MIT project now that they've had a falling out. I think the takedown needs to be reversed.

linksbro5• 11 years ago

This is an interesting take. I think if they continued to any new wahoo code after the disagreement and breaking up, then that new code is infringing. However, the agreed upon merge code might not be subject to the DMCA.

Tzadeck6• 11 years ago

Yes, but you missed the nuts and bolts of MIT subject to the following conditions:

    The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
    copies or substantial portions of the Software.

In the DMCA it's stated that his copyright is not credited, so they are in violation of MIT. Which is what is happening here.

icebraining4• 11 years ago

Replacing the code in the shared repository doesn't mean he transferred the copyright to them. When you contribute to a project, you still own the copyright, you just provided a licensed copy, and that project must still comply with it.

uxp• 11 years ago

This is correct. For an arbitrary and hypothetical example, imagine that Linus woke up yesterday and decided to convert the Linux kernel to an Apache licensed project. The long and almost impossible task would be to contact each and every contributor to the Linux kernel and ask for the permission to change the license of their contribution. The "short" and "easy" task would be to write a new kernel and replace all of Linux with it, applying the new license. The old Linux kernel would still be a GPL project, but moving forward any contributions would need to be Apache licensed.

It appears that the latter example is somewhat like what happened here. The old Oh-My-Fish project was some licensed project. It could have even been a WTF Public License[0] that _did_ allow contributors to fork and remove attribution. At some point, all the code in the repo was replaced with new code under the MIT license that served the same purpose, and the repo's name was changed. Moving forward, someone continued to merge in the new code to the old repo and tried to remove attribution to the new code, breaking the new code's license.

The Oh-My-Fish project could have done a classical fork, severing ties with the Wahoo project just before the merge of the re-written code happened and continue to work in isolation, but it seems that they did not.

[0] http://www.wtfpl.net

tankenmate• 11 years ago

There is also a school of thought that says once you have broken the conditions you would need to re-license the work and this might require a new negotiation; I don't think I've ever seen this line of argument tested in court however.

TallGuyShort5• 11 years ago

That's fair - although I can't imagine letting someone rename my project and deciding to collaborate on it together while still trying to retain my own copyright notice on files. I hope we hear the other side of the story. My point is just that the MIT license itself isn't necessarily the issue here.

geofft• 11 years ago

17 USC 512(f), come back, we miss you.

kriro• 11 years ago

So apart from bruised egos and non-attribution the major issue seems to be repo-stars?

I don't claim to understand what's going on at all or who is in the right/wrong but reading the GH issue discussion it's about repo ownership? Maybe I'm naive and easy to push around but why not just fork, re-add your copyright and start from 0 stars...only the code should matter, right?

Roodgorf• 11 years ago

From my understanding the oh-my-fish project has been around for a while and likely has some size of following. So the problem I see is the members of the organization using that existing notoriety to gain credit for the work the Wahoo creator did without citing it as his/hers. The fork and re-add wouldn't have the desired effect then because likely the core audience of OhMyFish still wouldn't see it.

Although I'm not sure if I'm missing something here as well, your guess is as good as mine.

Tzadeck6• 11 years ago

If oh-my-fish properly included the copyright and permission notice of the MIT license, then they are within the bounds of the license. It doesn't matter what the author's requests are, they can use it if they attribute properly. But they failed to do so and the creator's copyright was not credited, so they are in violation of MIT, which is pretty lame considering how easy it is to use MIT code in a compliant way. I am afraid this DMCA is legit.

justinmayer3• 11 years ago

As with most things, this probably began as a communication problem between Jorge and Bruno, and it quickly went south from there. https://github.com/wa/wahoo/issues/95

If you'd like to try a Fish shell framework with a bit less drama, my I suggest my alternative? (^_^)

https://github.com/justinmayer/tacklebox

https://github.com/justinmayer/tackle

Tzadeck6• 11 years ago

Or just use https://github.com/wa/wahoo

jimmy1236• 11 years ago

Your plugins are copy and paste of several plugins used by Oh My Fish. Lucky for you Jorge has no ownership on those so he can't claim a DCMA Takedown.

justinmayer3• 11 years ago

That's not a fair claim. While some of the plugins come from OMF, proper attribution is given in the license.

Moreover, the majority of plugins in the repository do not, in fact, come from OMF.

CyberShadow• 11 years ago

For another perspective, here is a comment by @bpinto (OMF creator I think?) which @bucaran deleted from https://github.com/wa/wahoo/issues/95 :

http://dump.thecybershadow.net/7ff5a1088842959fb4d8d4be7d3ab...

jimmy1236• 11 years ago

Jorge Bucaran stole the project and destroyed it? An open source project? Shame on you! That everyone that work with you know about your actions here!

justinlardinois2• 11 years ago

Since you can't read oh-my-fish's repository now, can anyone answer this: did oh-my-fish's code give attribution to bucaran?

bucaran3• 11 years ago

No, they did not. The copyright was changed from my name to "Bruno Ferreira Pinto".

jimmy1236• 11 years ago

I have the code here and it's LICENSED for Oh My Fish, not for you bucaran.

Update: It seems like the solution is simple:

1. Oh My Fish repo changes the LICENSE to Licensed for Oh My Fish. 2. As Fin is a separate project that won't even share the same code, it is going to be licensed to bucaran. 3. Community is happy again! :D

th3m4ri0• 11 years ago

The repository as of Aug 25 has been restored here : https://github.com/oh-my-fish/framework

bucaran3• 11 years ago

We decided to reconcile and end the litigation amicably adding an AUTHORS file and the following copyright:

DMCA notice against oh-my-fish

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