I'm David Recordon and head up our open source programs at Facebook. I'd like to point out Jeff Verkoeyen's comment about where this specific piece of code came from. <a href="http://developers.enormego.com/view/what-happened-common-courtesy-facebook#comment-70135140" rel="nofollow">http://developers.enormego.com/view/what-happened-common-cou...</a><p>Back in February a developer outside of Facebook sent a GitHub pull request which included this pull to refresh functionality. At the time we believed that the developer wrote the code themselves and thus didn't realize that it actually came from Shaun's open source library EGOTableViewPullRefresh. I'm sorry that we messed this one up. Three20 has over a dozen different contributors (<a href="http://github.com/facebook/three20/blob/master/AUTHORS" rel="nofollow">http://github.com/facebook/three20/blob/master/AUTHORS</a>) and we try really hard to give credit where it is due.<p>As for fixing this, the code clearly came from EGOTableViewPullRefresh and we're updating the four file's within Three20 to directly reflect that and link back to Shaun's project. This patch will be pushed to GitHub shortly.<p>While it isn't the most well known address, please always feel free to email opensource@facebook.com or me directly at davidrecordon@facebook.com.
Before anybody blows this out of proportion...<p>I've used Three20 a ton, and actually build my Hacker News iPhone app using it.[1] I've used the drag-to-refresh header a bunch. This code was added to the Three20 framework months ago via somebody on GitHub. One pull request, and it was in the main repo.<p>The project is currently maintained by Jeff Verkoeyen, a full-time student. Three20 makes use of a ton of other open-source projects (JSON parser, etc.). Whoever submitted this code just didn't add any attribution. When Facebook updated their app, it was probably only 2-3 lines to add. And since it's been in the codebase for months now, and a bunch of other apps use it, they probably figured it was no problem.<p>Although flaming blog posts feel good to write, a much more constructive action would be to call up Facebook and talk to them. Or email Jeff. Or post to the Three20 Google Group (almost 1k people). Or submit an issue on GitHub. Or anything really.<p>Not to mention the fact that they stole it from Loren Bricher (Tweetie) in the first place...<p>[1] <a href="http://michaelgrinich.com/hackernews" rel="nofollow">http://michaelgrinich.com/hackernews</a>
The three20 dev admitted it was a mistake and took immediate corrective action.<p><a href="http://developers.enormego.com/view/what-happened-common-courtesy-facebook#comment-70135140" rel="nofollow">http://developers.enormego.com/view/what-happened-common-cou...</a><p>The majority of developers don't understand the nuances of copyright law; and, so OSS code is often mis-integrated and mis-attributed. I hazard most times an honest developer is informed of their missteps, they handle it similar to how we're seeing here.<p>Simple. No drama. Honest.<p>Let's not blow this out of proportion.
The three20 code has shuffled around a lot in the last 8 months or so, but if you look at the change log here <a href="http://github.com/facebook/three20/blob/master/CHANGES#L93" rel="nofollow">http://github.com/facebook/three20/blob/master/CHANGES#L93</a> you can see that the maintainer, Jeff (who was a college student at the time and has worked his butt off on three20) is thanking a 3rd party for contributing that code.<p>There's attribution for other code in three20, so I think it's safe to say that Jeff didn't know.<p>It's also possible that there was simply a miscommunication somewhere along the chain. I wouldn't assume this is anyone being evil or devious until we hear the full story, and I expect the lack of attribution will be fixed quickly.
The files do essentially the same thing. So consider: is it possible that two development teams, implementing the same feature, will use the same style of implementation?<p>The code diff he presents seems to be UI code. How many ways are there to set a label's font? (though having the same exact pixel values is perhaps a bit odd)<p>The code is structured differently, named differently, and (to my untrained eyes) even appears to differ in some implementation details (such as setUpdateDate, which uses NSDateFormatterShortStyle, versus setCurrentDate, which uses its own custom format). Perhaps the author is simply feinting at shadows.
The title is somewhat misleading since the author of the post (and also the coder of the OSS feature used) is not against Facebook using it on its iPhone app. He talks about how they use his code on their three20 library without attribution.