Team 1676-2006 Source Code Released!

[eugenebrooks]

Originally Posted by devicenull

I would check with IFI on that first.. Check out the bottom of any IFI page..


I would also do some more research on that before you say things like IFI doesn't have a copyright on their code..

From here

From my understanding, unless they explicitly say they release the copyright on their code, it is NOT public domain.

Notwisthstanding the post in wikipedia, the authoritative document that
it is, any intellectual property lawyer will tell you that if you want to
defend a copyright on your code, your first step is to include the
copyright in every source file, explaining terms of use that you intend
to defend. I know this because I have dealt with intellectual property
lawyers on such matters. This is the standard practice in the industry
for computer code, and it is not to be confused with the standard
practice for phonograph records.

I did not say that IFI had released their code into the public domain.
That usually entails a copyright notice explicitly indicating such handling,
something that I am also familiar with and use now and then. I did
use the term, the cat is out of the bag, and I think that common sense,
if not case law, prevails here.

IFI releases their code as a template for teams to use, and obviously
from their actions (or lack thereof), does not find teams sharing modified
snippets of their code objectionable as this is the purpose of the FIRST
robotics activity. This is to be applauded and I applaud it. Not to
worry, when I see indications that I should change my view, I will
post the adjustment...

Eugene Brooks

Copyright 2006, Eugene D Brooks III. This is my opinion, which can
be copied and shared in any form desired, but only I get to change it.

[Mike]

Originally Posted by eugenebrooks

Thats one of the many neat things about copyrights,
you have to show them in order to have them,

Ehhh, not so much. Any works transmitted over the internet receive an automatic copyright to their original other, per the DMCA.

[Bharat Nain]

This code will be off the internet in a few hours. Nothing to worry about - their programmer just did not go on CD for a while so I brought this to his attention.

[nukem]

Sorry about all this, I have been away from cd for awhile working on other things. Anyway I posted the code thinking it would be a gracious and professional thing to do trying to help other teams with our source code. I only included Kevin's code so people could download the code all in one place. I looked in the readme, and for a license file, both which did not mention anything about not releasing the code but I did not think to look in the source code itself (my code is in separate files so I rarely look at Kevin's stuff). Anyway the code is hidden now on the project page.

Sourceforge has a policy of only deleting project files on a case by case basis, I have put in an urgent request for the files to be deleted Sourceforge. I hope in the future Kevin, the FIRST foundation, and the FIRST community will take a GNU approach to things, but until then I will do my best to get the code removed from the site as quickly a possible.

[devicenull]

Originally Posted by nukem

Sorry about all this, I have been away from cd for awhile working on other things. Anyway I posted the code thinking it would be a gracious and professional thing to do trying to help other teams with our source code. I only included Kevin's code so people could download the code all in one place. I looked in the readme, and for a license file, both which did not mention anything about not releasing the code but I did not think to look in the source code itself (my code is in separate files so I rarely look at Kevin's stuff). Anyway the code is hidden now on the project page.

Sourceforge has a policy of only deleting project files on a case by case basis, I have put in an urgent request for the files to be deleted Sourceforge. I hope in the future Kevin, the FIRST foundation, and the FIRST community will take a GNU approach to things, but until then I will do my best to get the code removed from the site as quickly a possible.

If you know his reasoning, it's easy to understand why he doesn't want it released:

Originally Posted by Kevin Watson

I guess I should explain why I don't want entire copies of my code available elsewhere on the 'net. Two years ago, I posted some code that was later modified and posted on a team's website (team A). Another team (Team B) used the modified version of the code on their robot, but had problems because the modified code had a bug introduced by team A. Team B e-mailed me and said that my code didn't work for them and asked if could I help find the bug. Well, this was during the 2004 six week build period and I was at work when I got the e-mail. Not seeing how the bug could possibly happen and worried that many teams were having the same problem, I left work early so that I could go home and try to reproduce the bug on a real controller. Well, after a few frustrating hours trying to reproduce the bug, I found out that Team B used Team A's modified code, where the bug was found. The point I'm trying to make is that it's much easier for me (and others here on CD) to help diagnose problems if I know that the team started with a build that I know works on my hardware.

-Kevin

[nukem]

You just need to make sure you clearly state that if you use a fork of a piece of software that you can only goto the place you got it from not the place they got it from. In the open source community you always work up, for example if I had a problem with gaim I would file a bug with gentoo(my distro) and if they couldnt resolve it and gentoo developers decided it was a gaim problem it would be resolved upstream and I would then file a bug with gaim. The Linux kernel has a definition were you can defined what extra version it is(like if your using the gentoo patches its call 2.6.16-gentoo). All the code needs is a version definition and state in the readme that if you redistribute the code you need to change that to your team number.

[nukem]

Also keep in mind that Kevin stated on this thread that patch files were ok. There are three problems with that.

1. If you look in a patch file parts of the original code are in the actual patch file not just the the newly added code.
2. Under what was said in the pervious post by devicenull people will still go back to Kevin I dont think that distributing a patch file instead of the full source would make any difference.
3. Sooner or later some teams are going to include a script file in there zip file that will look like this

wget http://kevin.org/frc/frc_camera.zip
cat camer_code | team_xxxx.patch -p1