An Unbelievable Demo

This is the story of the most unbelievable demo I’ve been given in world of open source. You can’t make this stuff up.

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I printed socketsnoop.d. The screen filled with my own script. It was the same incomplete attempt I had hacked up a year earlier, and published as open source. It included some weird code that only made sense when I wrote it (use of PFORMAT, prior to defaultargs) and was written in my earlier coding style. I was looking at my own fucking script.

“This is MY script.”

I printed the other tools and saw the same – they were all mine. This hot new Sun product that Mr. VIP was touring the world showing off was actually just my own open source tools.

My jaw was on the floor. He didn’t seem to believe me.

I used grep to search all his tools for my name, which was in the header comment of all my tools, to prove beyond a doubt that these were mine. But I found nothing. My name had been stripped.

Why doesn’t that surprise me!

The last part made me sad :worried:

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Certainly wouldn’t have surprised me a bit if that were done after the acquisition by 'Orrible, but having dealt with them very little, I am a bit surprised that Sun was that evil. :frowning_face:

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Just wow… :man_facepalming:

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What Sun Microsystems did was nasty, but I think that wasn’t the first and the last time a company did that. :frowning_face:

When someone puts his/her values aside, they don’t feel any shame in stealing others’ work. When I was new to development and was learning predominantly from video tutorials, I saw video courses I already took somewhere else republished on Udemy with a slight name change, and when I contacted Udemy and provided them the proof that someone else’s work is stolen and is being sold on their platform, they asked me if I was the copyright owner, instead of taking down the course.

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A few years later, Apple added dozens of my tools to OS X. They left my name, copyright, and CDDL open source license intact, and even improved and enhanced some of them. Years later, Oracle did the same for Oracle Solaris 11, and the BSD community did for FreeBSD. My thanks to all of you.

I think a company as resourceful as Apple and Oracle, should not just leave the copyright intact, but if they’re making money out of that programmer’s code, they should even compensate the programmer.

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If a programmer built something great, it is the company that gets recognized. But if something bad happens, it is the programmer’s fault.

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Shocking…if they are selling for financial gain he should sue for damages !

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