My plugin is being plagerised/copied

My plugin (Punishmental http://dev.bukkit.org/server-mods/punishmental/) is being copied over and over by other plugins. Killbox (http://dev.bukkit.org/server-mods/kill-box/) in particular has copied most (if not all) of my ideas, and was made months after mine. While I am flattered that me and my friends (I do the coding, my friend comes up with punishments that he thinks would work) idea has taken off, I'm a bit annoyed that he doesn't even mention that it was our idea to start off with. I'd be prepared to accept that he didn't get any inspiration from ours, if it wasn't for the fact that several unique ideas (like dropping the player, or striking them with a bolt of lightning) have been implemented in his almost immediately AFTER they appear in mine. It just seems a tad coincidental.

Both me and my friend are planning on going to uni in 2 years, and could do with extra crediting (such as being established programmers) to put in our CVs, but the whole thing seems a bit pointless if other people are just going to steal our ideas and say that they were theirs.

Again, I'm not looking for it to be removed, but perhaps some recognition that the idea for his plugin was originally ours. Thanks.

PS: I'm not sure if this is the right section. Its not a plugin, its not a bukkit-specific issue, but it is about a plugin, and a problem. Sorry if it is the wrong section.

 

http://forums.bukkit.org/threads/what-license-is-the-bukkit-project-under.154/

http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html

Sorry man, if you don't like it don't use an API under the GPL license as your platform...

Besides, what you have described:

Is FAR from unique... The implementation of such a simple concept can really only be handled in a few ways, if it was a more complex system like a hashmap storage system of ip keys and custom class values then you may have a leg to stand on, but what you have described is nothing more than a functions worth of code, and a simple function at that...

Just be honored someone found your code useful and move on, or stop sharing your code (I don't release any projects to the public, this is one contributing reason).

 

And besides, from your own dev page:

 

Then just contact the author of that plugin and ask him to add credits for the idea or even link to your original plugin.

But still, some of them are really common ideas and they're named quite differently.

 

I realized the point of opensource and GPL and GNU, and didn't expect it to be at any point against that particular set of rules/laws.
What I did expect was that functional ideas (Function being the end users experience of being able to drop a player from a height, for example. That wasn't around till I put it in my plugin, then all of a sudden, some other people implemented/copied it in the exact same form as mine) could be credited to their original author, as is often how I've seen it done as common practice. I've already done Digi's suggestion.

Smart move. I'd do that to if it wasn't that I have people in my village who doubt my abilities (I have autism) and I feel the need to show them that the things I do are actually worth something to other people, in the form of downloads.

I suppose, though, its more of an annoyance than an actual concern than anything else, I suppose. Thanks anyways.

 

RjSowden, the only advice I can offer you is to try and find joy in your own accomplishments; If you feel pride in what you do and know that it's a true reflection of your best efforts then you have accomplished something, regardless of what others say.

You and only you know what you are capable of, and if you always push yourself to the limits of that expectation you will never give a person a justifiable reason to think low of you, and if observers say otherwise it's likely due to an insecurity of their own and not a true reflection of their opinion of you.

Do your best, the rest is irrelevant.

 

So much wisdom! (that isn't sarcastic BTW, I mean it). However, I feel that we live in a modern society where outward appearance (whether intellectual or physical) matters more than actual attainment - Steve jobs was more of a designer than a programmer, and he showed off his work - look what happened. All for designing a plain white case. When he died, everyone when crazy. The month afterwards, the man who invented the whole Linux concept (which if we look closely into we find a lot was stolen from, a few times by Bill Gates, but more by Steve jobs) died. No one noticed. No public out roar (I cant even remember his name). Yet without him, we wouldn't have ipods, macs, or even a gui on windows. That means no bukkit, no minecraft... But nobody mourned his passing.
The same goes for all the mathematicions at bletchly park. Sure, Alan Turing got credit for winning the deciphering side of World War 2. but the people who originally spotted the first patterns in the messages (who then gave it to Alan, who then amalgamated it) weren't recognized. yet without them, Its quite probable that the allies would have lost WW2.

What I'm getting at here is, unless you make yourself and your achievements known, you don't get rewards. In my case, the achievement will probably be 10,000 downloads, and the reward being boosting my CV credentials.

But anyway, we're not here to debate the meaning of life. We're here to program. So lets do that.

 

I guess I just see it differently; they may have not gotten credit, but that doesn't diminish the importance of their accomplishments in any way. The importance of those peoples existence is measured by impact they had on the world, not the ability of society around them to acknowledge those accomplishments.

For instance, Norman Borlaug...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug
Probably one of the most selfless, noteworthy human beings to ever walk this planet. This person is a Nobel peace prize winner who has been accredited with saving one billion lives... ONE BILLION! and yet I bet 98% of the people who read this post have never heard of him... But does this make his accomplishments any less important, any less vital to man kind?

Exactly as you said, if it wasn't for some of these nameless heroes we wouldn't have many of the tools available to us that we so much enjoy today, but don't you think that each day those people walked this earth and saw someone using something they created they gained a level of satisfaction that they and only they could feel... And that satisfaction didn't take a single external person to manifest itself.

I get your point, and it's actually an extremely valid one; but humans are cruel and selfish by nature, if you live your life always trying to live up to societies unachievable goals you'll just get burned.

 

Hi,

Author of KillBox here.

I'm literally just a Canadian high school kid who's getting into programming, and before you seiged my bukkitdev page and page on the thread with accusations of plagiarism, I honestly have never seen your plugin before. I know there's not much I can do to prove that, but that's the truth.

To reiterate what these guys are saying, our plugins are ways of killing people, nothing revolutionary. Every idea has been thought of on my own, cross my heart. You really should take a step back and look at this in context; there are dozens of plugins that offer our features.

My advice to you, however, is to take this with a grain of salt. Chill. I made KillBox so it could be used on my friends server's and nothing more - i'm not seeking any kind of glory from this. Also, it would have been appreciated if you messaged me about the issue before 'taking it public' and doing the pointing fingers game.

If you really don't believe me, i'll take it down. Fuck it, i'll send you the source code to see the difference. (or maybe i should do it publicly. But I'm not going to play those games.)

But maybe you should've talked to me before whining on the forums.


Edit: after reading this more thoroughly, i must note that striking a player with lightning and launching them is really easy to code, and were implemented in my original version. What does look suspicious however, is how i implemented wolf-spawning soon after the initial release, a feature also in your plugin. It confuses me though how I'm accused of stealing your source code even though I haven't seen you post it anywhere. Also, This is a thread of me asking how to incorporate this particular feature on the forums. So no, i didn't plagiarize it just appears that *gasp* more than one person can have the same ideas.


Andrew

I haven't heard from him other than posting accusations on my threads.

EDIT by Moderator: merged posts, please use the edit button instead of double posting.

 

Well.. I made antispawnegg, and i had no idea there was any other plugin out there like it, infact there was just one other called no spawn eggs, i felt pretty embarrassed, but what i went ahead and did was made my plugin better without copying his features. Basically the idea is competition is good for the server owners who want the best plugin with the most features. I agree with you on the fact that its pretty easy to have the same idea, and to code the same way. Its just the fact of coding for an api such as bukkit, there isn't millions of ideas, its limited to what minecraft has. If minecraft gets a new feature, bam theres new plugin ideas. Hopefully you guys do whats best for your fans and try to make a better plugin then each other

 

Original ideas, eh? Some of your "original ideas" have been part of the /slay command in godPowers since the old days of hMod. Please pull the long stick out of your buttocks and realize that others can have similar ideas.

 

Note: tl;dr available
[rant]
I think that this is half the problem...

People don't realize that there are other plugins that do the EXACT same thing (or a very similar thing) and release their plugin.

BAM!!! (Note, these numbers are pulled out of thin air)
2 weeks later, we have 20 chat plugins, 12 are outdated,
35 anti-TNT plugins, 21 are broken,
17 protection plugins, 11 are broken... etc.

If we only had one or two of each, it would be SOOO much easier to maintain and add new features. Imagine if plugin devs teamed up and instead of re-coding features that have been done hundreds of times over, they contributed to an existing project to make it better?
[/rant]

tl;dr Team up instead of recoding features 100 times over.

And with regard to what Father Of Time wrote,

Just because the bukkit project is GPL, the plugins for it are not necessarily the same way.
My plugins are TPL (a custom license I wrote).

Take windows, for example. Just because it is closed source and paid software, there are still open source programs available for it.

EDIT by Moderator: merged posts, please use the edit button instead of double posting.

 

tyzoid You can declare your work what ever license you want, I could declare it a poodle if I wanted... but that doesn't mean it will have any standing in court.

That is a direct quote from EvilSeph. Also, this is a direct quote from the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE, Version 3, 29 June 2007

You might want to do some research on licenses if you take this stuff seriously, I don't think you fully understand how they protect you and your intellectual work...

 

lolz... I'm sorry to say, but you should have known what leeway you were giving for people to take your ideas when you made it open for people to take. I feel it is rediculous that you would complain about people taking your idea's yet you made it obviously possible for them to do so. Be happy to have contributed to the advancements of all plugins instead of selfishly worrying about a plagurism act that was nt even committed based on code that was available to the public. It is the same as leave a carton of milk in a friends house and expecting after a week for it to not have been touched... Very immature to complain about this, when you could have made precautions from the start to prevent this from happening. You did not though, so it is something you will have to deal with.

 

Speaking of GNU, can you have that liscense, but encrypt your sourcecode for better security?

 

I am no license expert by any means (in fact I know very very little about them), but from the same article:

So it appears that GNU has several conditions that must be met to be declared a project protected by the GNU license, and the act of obfuscating (encrypting) your source code violates two of those conditions.

However, if you have a true concern of plagiarism you may want to consult a lawyer.

 

I'm nowhere near a viable release of any plugin. it was more of information's sake. Thanks again father

 

It's my pleasure.

 

I do understand, I was just unaware of that clause in the GPL.

There are ways around that, however, for example, if you write your own API abstraction layer, only the part with the bukkit hooks would have to be GPL...

 

Father Of Time
Don't quote me or anything, but I believe I've read somewhere that you can obfuscate your source (for example, in your compiled jar files) as long as anyone can receive the source un-obfuscated on request.

Edit: As long as a user can have access to the source code, it does not violate GNU. That is, unless it states that they must be able to access source without request. Requesting and being granted is still considered 'access' to the source code.

 

That would make more sense. Because then you know exactly where your source code is distributed to. Is there a clause that if you have obfuscated source, and are asked for said source, that the person getting the source cannot redistribute it to anyone?