A rant done right

About a decade ago, I encountered my boss just as he was reviewing his tax bill for the building in which we had our office. He was not in a good mood, because the rates were--if I recall correctly--about three times their residential equivalents. When he grumbled over the disparity, I said, "Well, people gotta have someplace to live; businesses are using property to make a buck." And he really didn't have an argument for that.

I remembered that conversation when I bumped into Why I (A/L)GPL (NSFW, btw) on the stopover at Cafe Au Lait during this morning's news crawl.

Normally, I'd prefer my blog posts to be more than a link and a "Yeah! What s/he said!" In this case, I'm not sure that I can add anything much from the standpoint of philosophical underpinnings.

However, it hits a nerve that maybe I and some other programmers (and self-styled hackers) don't share. That's because I more or less backed into programming by way of a History/English degree and a bit of professional writing. In the writing-for-humans universe, the penalties for plaguarism are steep. You can fail a class, be kicked out of school, be fired and seriously undermine a career by publishing someone else's work as if it were your own. That being said, understand that I have no problem sourcing code from the internet when I find an excellent example of what I'm trying to accomplish. But. When I adopt someone else's solution, you'd better believe that an attribution is included in the source code. (To be fair, I've known other programmers who do this as well; I've also just known others who don't.)

Yes, I'm quite aware that there's more than a little machismo wrapped up in coding--driven, I suspect, by the fetish our culture makes of innovation. And it's quite misplaced, IMO. C'mon: English majors don't have the same spitting matches over single-vs.-double quotation marks as programmers do over where to put the curly-braces. (In any case, writing instructions for humans is much harder than writing them for computers when you can't afford to be misinterpreted. Trust me--I've done both.)

But machismo is no excuse for taking credit for someone else's work. And it's even less of an excuse for making a buck off someone else's work and expecting to do so for free as a permanent business model. Of course software is expected to provide an income--or at least bragging rights--for those who make it (unless they choose anonymous altruism). But the same is true of writing. The New York Times can't troll the internet and copy and paste indie content into its own publication without attribution. I certainly can't hope to make bank from a seven-book series about a boy wizard and his two best friends fighting an evil enchanter. There's absolutely no reason that the plagiarism rules for source code should ever be any looser than for any other writing. Most especially--and I cannot hammer this enough--when it is done for profit.