Hey guys, this time I really messed up :/

I think you should see something.

Like I mentioned many time before, this isn't my first attempt at creating an aggregator. Years ago, I built something similar, and back then I drew a lot of inspiration from Postmill. This time, to avoid starting from scratch, I get some elements from my old snippets. Originally, kbin was meant to be a project just for me and a few friends, so I didn't attribute the origin authors. That's not an excuse, though — I should have done it right away when the project became public on git. I have a point in my roadmap called "Preparing a repository for contributors," where I allocated a significant amount of time to educate myself about licenses, attributions, and so on. Unfortunately, everything unfolded in the wrong order.

https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/196

I think Emma is right. Since I share my small successes with you, I also want to be transparent about my failures and mistakes. I will push the proper attributions to the repository today along with some critical fixes.

To avoid reinventing the wheel, I took some code used in federation from Pixelfed as well. Essentially, there are two projects two projects will be marked. However, I have never concealed this fact:

https://kbin.social/m/random/p/254858/The-real-reason-why-I-haven-t-published-the-pixelfed-app#post-comment-438684

I mean that I'm not a guy who wants to steal your code. It's obvious that someone will take a look at the code of a project that is very similar to theirs. Sometimes, I just become terribly messy when I have to do many things at once. This lesson will definitely teach me to prioritize tasks better.

In the end, I can only promise that once everything settles down and I manage to extract a library for ActivityPub, I will revisit the Postmill repository, this time with a pull request proposal.

You should definitely check it out.

https://postmill.xyz/ - Project page
https://raddle.me/ - Postmill instance
https://pixelfed.org/ - Of course, everyone here is familiar with this one ;)

PS. the website should be running a bit faster. I will talk about it next time.

TechnologyClassroom,

AGPL can still be used to license the project while specific files that were used with the zlib license can include attribution. Not a lawyer, but very familiar with software licensing.

Xero,

No worries, it's all good!

NorthernLightMountain,
NorthernLightMountain avatar

Good on you for being so transparent! Very well handled mate.

GlassHalfHopeful,

I'm glad you're owning this as you are. I was also encouraged by the reference to assuming good intent (or good faith, WP:AGF) at your repo. I know that this is terribly embarrassing and difficult, but it's also something that can be amicably resolved and become a really powerful lesson for everyone.

Software development can be a pretty messy business. In my context, we've been trying to be much much more careful with copyrights and licensing. It's much easier to make such mistakes and people realize.

Heck, I spent two days last week tracking down some nasty memory and resource leaks. Did sone research online. Turns out that an intern, about a year ago, tried to resolve a problem by straight up copying a hefty amount of code from stack exchange. This was a doozy too. It was performing some coding gymnastics most people aren't even well acquainted with. It seemed like it solved the problem though, so copy-paste-commit.

Copy paste. Copy paste. It can be the bane of so many problems.

Take care of this, Ernest. Do right by the author. And the world is a better place for it.

Rodrickee,
Rodrickee avatar

Thank you very much for the transparency

csolisr,

Well, at least it was just something easy to solve (adding the missing credits) and not actually replacing code incompatible with the project’s license! Imagine if you had used, say, a LGPL license for Kbin and went and added a full GPL’d library to the source code, that would have been a mess to solve and would have justifiably killed the project.

rodti,

It’s all good. You’re doing excellent work. Sometimes we all have to step back and accept we could have done things better, but if we don’t try in the first place we’ll never know.

AwkwardPenguin,

Dude, well spoken! The author is in her right to confront you on it but you're handling it the right way.

You're the earnest Ernest I've ever come across.. technically the only Ernest but who knows right.

petrescatraian,

@ernest this will be a great material for TIFU some day

Tempiz,
@Tempiz@sh.itjust.works avatar

Transparency is key, keep up the great work.

roofuskit,
roofuskit avatar

Lol, she picked a hell of a username on codeberg. Very fitting.

"Hey Ernest, I see you have used my code from (project) without proper attribution as required by the license. Can you please correct the attribution or remove the infringing code?"

How hard would that have been? If she didn't get the response she wanted she could then escalate.

SeedyOne,

Appreciate the transparency Ernest.

Sausage,
Sausage avatar

Every single thread or comment I see from you further cements the image of a good dude.

Mistakes happen, how we handle it defines us, and you've handled this the best way possible.

NettoHikari,

Don't worry, ernest. Your project is really nice and a big help for the Fediverse. I don't think that anyone will mind.

Kombat,
Kombat avatar

Transparency matters. Even if it comes a little bit late, its good to see the ability to admit a fault. Btw, thanks for allowing us all to hijack your once upon a time small website @ernest lol

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