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Ask HN: How do you give the original creator credit?

3 pointsby tuangeekabout 3 years ago
What is the ethical way of using open source project?

1 comment

armchairhackerabout 3 years ago
This is a good question.<p>What you <i>have</i> to do depends on the license. If it&#x27;s open-source generally the license just says &quot;include this license with the author&#x27;s name in your project&quot; (be wary of copyleft though).<p>What you <i>should</i> do? Per the definition, anyone open-sourcing their project should be ok with others using it without much in return. I think honestly, if you&#x27;re using something like npm or cargo or forking a repository, and your project itself is open-source, you&#x27;ve already given credit and you don&#x27;t need to do anything else. If you copy&#x2F;paste someone else&#x27;s code, you should put a comment above the copy attributing it to the author (along with including the license somewhere if necessary). And if your code and dependencies aren&#x27;t themselves open-source, then you should mention the open-source code you&#x27;ve used somewhere like the &quot;about&quot; section.<p>The one thing you should <i>not</i> do is take credit for someone else&#x27;s work. Don&#x27;t hide that you&#x27;re using each open-source project. Moreover, if a major feature or part of your project is someone else&#x27;s work, make that clear. Don&#x27;t copy a repository, change maybe 1 feature, and then distribute it without mentioning that 98% of it was from the original author. Most open-source devs won&#x27;t ask for much credit, but if they do don&#x27;t deny it to them.