It's reminiscent of people adding "no copyright intended" (sic) when posting other people's music online. It seems like intuitions about copyright have been shifting, even if the law hasn't.

> It seems like intuitions about copyright have been shifting, even if the law hasn't.

I think people actually know it's wrong and legally questionable.

I believe they do it because they simply want to do it and in the back of their minds, hope adding some bogus disclaimer will let them get away with it... because other people seem to be getting away with it.

I think people think it's legally wrong but not morally wrong, and so they add a bogus disclaimer hoping that they can get away with it because other people have.

At the least, the internet eventually realized that "you must delete your video game ROMs within 24 hours of obtaining them" is not a valid legal stance.

Oh that jogs forgotten memories.

Anyone remember that disclaimer some pirate websites used to have where they said something starting with something like “On October 28, 1998, President Clinton signed into law the Digital Millennium Copyright Act”, and the disclaimer went on to mention some DMCA exceptions like learning and teaching or something? Always gave me a chuckle. As if saying that the DMCA does not apply for you is enough to make it actually so.

No, it's that no one assumes the MIT License is the default one that every open source project ever uses.

Probably they are employed at companies who are themselves violating GPL and have seen this being done there.

How do you think companies end up violating GPL. Maybe sometimes it's a heartless executive, but a lot of enterprise software devs are completely unconcerned with licenses. If they can get their hands on it, the license doesn't matter.

I had a senior dev at a past job who did this constantly. And when it was found out how much he actually stole, our entire team was laid off and replaced by the company that did the audit.

He just refused to believe that software licenses were real. That and I dont think he could actually code anything from scratch without stealing large swaths of code from open source repositories.

Copy/paste without attribution to license or permission is more blatant.

Organizationally he was given free reign to do whatever he wanted, and that lead to the entire teams downfall. He canceled code reviews... for himself. Well, he actually stated, all code reviews go through him, thus he "code reviewed" his own code. I remember he was once a few weeks late on delivering a basic landing page, and when it finally got to QA at 9pm on a Friday, our entire team was forced to work the weekend and QA gave me a TFS export of more than 200 defects I had to fix because he was unreachable. Needless to say, our entire team was upset we all got laid off, but also relieved because we all ended up in better jobs. At least everyone I've talked to, which is everyone but him, as he has never responded to a single text message or email since he quit after the layoff (he refused severance, and just walked out), all his socials went off line, and any record of his name has disappeared from the internet. I'm fairly certain he was a conman, but I have no way of finding out.

Maybe hired by a competitor to tank the company intentionally? I would not put it past many big companies to do something like that.

That takes some skill. I was almost duped like that by someone we nearly hired for a sales position, which is much easier to fake for a few months, especially working remote.

He can believe the GPL isn’t real all he wants. In that case how did he justify breaching copyright law?

> I had a "senior" dev...

Ftfy.

His resumé seemed to back up his claim. Not sure if it was real, though. HR called every one of my past employers and my references, so I figured they would have followed up on his, too.

Yes, I know the type - I have met a few of "senior" devs that were anything but. I can imagine their past employer didn't even know their true worth, or lack of. Sorry you had that experience.

In all the enterprise companies I worked for we are drilled with required learning and assessments which often include training on software licenses. The aim of these training is devs to keep an eye for license and defer to someone higher up if in doubt. These processes are manual and catch only so much.

In companies with mature software processes there is always tooling that will block a release if it finds unacceptable license. To me it looks like TikTok hasn't properly invested in tooling and this somehow slipped.

Enterprises of even modest size take it very seriously. They’ll be juicy targets to go after. It’s everything between startups to midsize companies where this is not clearly defined. Just ask the VCs who do due diligence. Almost everyone of them will audit your licenses before they invest. One of the things they ask for is the list of libraries you use and their licenses.

As a open-source-license expert dev, in the past I've been able to offer a lot of value to my employer by assembling that list in such a way that the buyer could have high confidence in our audit of dependencies.

This doesn't protect anybody against illegal copy-pasta by ignorant/irresponsible devs, though.

We couldn't ship software until we cleared every bit of code flagged by a tool that scanned our code for open source. Most of the hits were for projects with a safe license and there were many false positives but all in all it was a great step in our static code analysis. I find it astonishing that a company of any size would skip this step.

Well, TikTok is a Chinese company, so it seems safe to assume that it's just part of the culture ?

I think a lot of software engineers nowadays write server software, where they can often be somewhat allowed to be unconcerned with licenses [1], since the actual binary produced from the code lives on the server, and is typically not distributed outside the company.

As a result of this, I think there's this mass misunderstanding of how licenses work in the software engineering field.

[1] With the exception of AGPL if I understand correctly.

A lot of companies do not hire software engineers to implement the system; instead, they contract it to third party (tech service companies such as Cognizant). I think some sort of auditing is done at the delivery, if they concern about the license. But in the context of Java web app, the enterprise software is usually built on dependencies under APA, so it should be of less concern

It might not be like this everywhere, but in the US all software engineers are self-labelled. It's not like medical doctor (MD) or professional engineer (PE) where the title actually implies some license to practice.

Common misconception, but Software Engineer is actually a licensed profession in many states (with vague industry exemptions): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineering_professio...

But virtually nobody does it. The NCEES even abandoned their Software Engineer licensing exam a few years ago because nobody was taking it.

Lightly glancing it seems like there are hard requirements for a college education for some of these. That’s a hard-stop for many (including myself.)

Even if you had a degree, working in this field should teach you it's not a requirement.

This does not deserve to be downvoted. A degree is secondary to actual talent. Too many students in my graduating class were undeserving of their degree, and plenty of folks can do the job without it.

yeah, that's fine. You should call yourself a software developer (or, as I call myself, a software plumber). An software engineer, minimally IMO, is someone who can 1) produce a software BOM, and 2) can craft an SLA. I can maybe do 1, and can't do 2. So, I don't call myself a software engineer.

> Software Engineer is actually a licensed profession in many states

Last time I looked, I couldn't find any. Some states tried for a while, but I think they all gave up.

In Europe being an engineer has civil accountability on issues.

You can be fined really high if you hire a self-called engineer without a proper degree. Or at least decades of alleged experience in the field.

Well, yes, this applies to engineering. But not to software engineering.

Personally, I like „software engineering“ as it is — being a free profession where talent counts more than a degree.

The degree is part of the training of an engineer, not the professional designation itself. The challenge with our current understanding of the title software engineer is that practitioners are not held to the same standards and responsibilities as other engineering fields. It doesn't have anything to do with talent.

You can only be held to some standards if there exist a common set of standards that the entire industry can agree on. This is impossible for software.

* not held to any standards and responsibilites.

FTFY.

Cynically, Me.

> talent counts more than a degree

Are you saying for MD or PE that talent doesn't matter?

Anybody can say they are a software engineer. The title means nothing.

Yes. A degree matters much more than talent. If you can get a degree you can practice. The most talented person in the world with no degree can't.

Some people go to places where their low talent but high cash flow allows them to get a license.

Okay, so for an MD a degree is necessary that's true. But an MD with a degree and no talent probably won't be an MD for long.

MD at least means something. "Software engineer" means nothing.

Once you are an MD unless you challenge powerful forces in your association or hospital you are free to practice bad medicine as long as you can stay within some reasonable guidelines around billing and when to order tests. This gets exposed with surgery but is a lot easier with a GI doctor.

They both mean something. You have to dive in to get the real scope regardless. If you just need a title for your commerical MD would carry more weight around diet products and a developer around a new software offering.

There are a lot of incurious paint-by-numbers doctors in the US. Doing your job by rote won't get you fired.

Oddly enough, I don't think I'd care to visit a medical professional whose sole virtue was talent. I'd kinda prefer some knowledge and skill, too.

It surely does, e.g. in Portugal you can't even name a Software Engineering degree without approval from the Order.

You are not required to do the exam, provided there is no civil liability or signing projects as the legally responsible Software/Informatics Engineering.

>Well, yes, this applies to engineering. But not to software engineering.

Good luck with that here.

What's talent got to do with it?

Especially without the accountability. Call yourself a software engineer? Did your code break? Is it vulnerable to exploits? What was the damage? Did you ship it knowing it was not fit for public usage? Congratulations! you're no longer allowed to program for a living and the state is suing you and your employer for damages.

I think part of the problem is that compared to more traditional forms of engineering, software engineering is still really young and not as rigorous. Right now, _nobody_ can write code without any bugs it in whatsoever. If we banned people who wrote buggy code, pretty soon we'd have no software engineers left. Regardless of whether you think that's a good idea, it seems pretty clear that at the very least there is a lot of demand for programmers, so it's unlikely the industry would get behind limiting that further in such a drastic way.

> If we banned people who wrote buggy code

That's not the standard for any kind of engineering. Professional Engineers make errors all the time. But they also design systems with fail safes, redundancies, safety factors, etc... You design systems with the expectation that failures will happen. Users will do stupid things. Highly improbably sequences will probably happen.

Not all code needs to be designed so carefully. Nobody cares if Hacker News is offline for a few hours. But the software systems in self driving cars or running an MRI machine probably should be designed by licensed professionals who can stand up to their bosses and say "this can't ship until these improvements are made" because if it does ship, they can be personally sued for malpractice and lose their license.

The issue is not banning, rather lack of liability.

Even the cook at the bistro on the corner is liable if the food, cleaning or refrigeration isn't as it is supposed to be

> In Europe being an engineer has civil accountability on issues. You can be fined really high if you hire a self-called engineer without a proper degree.

One more case of mistakenly presenting 'Europe' as an homogenous entity, whereas it depends on countries like anywhere else.

In France anyone can claim an engineer position, it is not licensed. You just cannot tell you hold an engineer degree if you haven't one; and that's pretty theoretical, because basically nobody uses the proper formal title (unlike for example in Germany where they always use the words Dipl. Ing.), so you can always fall back on claiming you are talking about the position and not the degree title.

Looks like they stopped offering exam to license people: https://www.nspe.org/resources/pe-magazine/may-2018/ncees-en...

It has been many years since After The Gold Rush was published and we are no closer today than we were then. At some point software engineering will be a real profession but I doubt anyone will take action before some huge catastrophe pushes the issue.

I don't like the idea of gatekeeping, it's hard enough to hire people.

In the US we don't really have licensing for engineers (there is PE, but it's not anything close to ubiquitous). I think it's one of the best parts of our engineering/tech culture.

You're an engineer based on the skills you employ to solve the problems you do, not because some body of people gave you a slip of paper that says you can employ those skills to solve those problems.

Gatekeeping in the software industry is a surefire way to slow down innovation. Software would stop eating the world, or only take a bite every couple of decades.

Sure because there is no innovation across the engineering fields.

The best of innovators have the same thing to offer regardless of formal credentials.

A big difference is whether or not this is well recognized, and by whom and/or at their own peril.

In the US, PE has made it so the word “engineer” is legally protected, like “doctor”. No one enforces it for software, so I wonder if it’s even enforceable anymore. But the law is there.

In some fields of engineering PE is pretty nonexistent. Some people come from other degrees (like math, physics) and call themselves engineer without difficulty. But engineering fields require a much more narrow and deep set of skills. generally the key classes to learn those skills come at the end of three or four years of prerequisite classes, so it's a pretty high barrier to starting without doing the degree.

In programming you can learn your way to advanced skills while getting paid. Once you know roughly one class worth of basics there's valuable contributions you can make, at least if you are decent at figuring things out on a computer.

Hate using this preface, but, unpopular opinion follows: The issue in the US is that the word engineer has been in common use to describe technical workers for a very long time. I've had friends who were:

* Engineers (and operated trains) * Manufacturing Engineers (who were really equipment techs) * Sanitary Engineers (who were really trash truck drivers) * UX Engineers (who were really web designers) * Software engineers (programmers) * Data Engineers (kind of dba-ish, maybe) * Culinary Engineer (restaurant kitchen designer)

Genericide has occurred. The boat sailed.

When the real estate industry wanted a word for "licensed seller of property" they had to make up a new word "Realtor" and protect that with a certification mark. The engineering industry really needs to do the same thing instead of harrassing the garbage truck driver, computer programmers and the guy who fixes the conveyor belt.

This is heavily dependent on the field and state. PEs are quite rare outside civil engineering.

Not enforceable. Or at least entirely winnable in court. Such a victory happened recently in Oregon:

https://ij.org/press-release/oregon-engineer-wins-traffic-li...

TL;DR: such restrictions violate your freedom of speech.

I think you are right and it's too bad. There are some fields that should have it.

For example, the software for self-driving cars should be signed off by a licensed engineer before it is allowed to go live. Many mechanical and electrical parts of the car have been designed by licensed professionals, why not the software?

One can verify and sign off on computations that approximate the physics or chemistry that will occur in a structure or machine, as a well established chain of procedures exist to go from crude formulaic approximations to micro or, if necessary, nano-scale simulations of electrical, mechanical, and chemical processes, and we know what to look for.

I don't think the same is true for software "engineering," as it seems that all possible forms of process can be subverted and cargo-culted, from agile methods down to code checking. Certainly there is room to remedy some shortcomings, but SWE definitely is the engineering discipline least based in physical fact.

The physics behind simulating the buckling of a structure is always the same, we can just choose more or less crude approximations of it, but SWE in general seems a lot more diverse. I can implement that simulation in assembly or some scripting language, and attach various bits and pieces to it to manage users and data; deploy it across the cloud if need be. But, there isn't a singular, time-invariant optimal path to achieving that, and what is true today may not be true tomorrow. One can work off basic principles, like the Agile Manifesto, but how can you quantify or even certify this shifting landscape?

Having studied both mechanical and software engineering at uni, I feel that you _can_ make the parallel between the two. It's just that in mechanical engineering we've converged a lot more over time. Out of convention and need for accountability much more than necessity. For example, for mechanical calculations we have converged on using mostly the same algebraic notation (never mind having minor differences here and there, such as in vector notation). Having an obscene amount of different notations, some so different that they are for the most part unintelligible to half the engineers out there, that would be unthinkable in ME, but is the norm in SE.

The _physics_ of a buckling structure may be always the same. But already the modelling techniques are far from obvious consensus: Do you do it analytically? Do you use FEM? BEM? Then there are a bunch of simulation techniques, i.e. for numerical integration, which you could use, much like you could use functional or imperative programming or OOP or whatever else.

So if we were to behave more like the _software_ branch of the engineering discipline in general, then we'd have a _much_ tighter space of languages that would be at all acceptable for any work deemed critical, like medical, administrative or aeronautical software.

I agree you can make software rigorous like in ME. The part which is hard is that debugging or proving properties about a program is much more difficult than writing the program. These costs are currently hard to amortize over multiple projects. Real-time systems have some of these facets (e.g., spacecraft).

For example, a memory allocator can be studied in the usual algorithmic sense or perhaps how they impact the stability of the system under randomized load. Can you prove the system remains stable? Yeah. Is it worth it when you can reboot machines and add some heuristics? No.

Currently, the big places which are getting any attention for verification of functionality are embedded applications and OS kernels. Even then, the depth of verification is limited to common bug categories.

> Many mechanical and electrical parts of the car have been designed by licensed professionals, why not the software?

Maybe some companies have some internal requirement for that, but generally speaking that's not true. Legal requirements for review and approval by a PE only apply to building drawings.

> At some point software engineering will be a real profession

I'm rooting for the same, finally we will earn like management /s

But you can be considered a software engineer by your peers, usually demonstrated through qualification and professional experience.

The differentiation I was trying to draw with those two words is: I don't know if they're actually working software developers or people who just hack on code in their free time. If they're professional devs, that's obviously much worse.

Honestly, not the part of that I was expecting to have to discuss.

Engineer is a legal term in some place where a degree is required in engineering.

The term developer doesn't require a license neither does CEO or board member or president of the US.

There are subtleties not captured by this quick overview which are not fully understood by (in my experience) the vast majority of programmers:

https://choosealicense.com/licenses/

If your project is going to be "real" (e.g., not some personal throwaway), you really need a lawyer if you are including anything other than MIT. Even Apache can be problematic when it comes to patenting.

What about BSD?

I am not a lawyer, but the (2-clause) BSD and MIT licenses look nearly identical to me. The wording is slightly different, but I think they express the same intent.

In many jurisidictions "Engineer" is a licensed and regulated title, and their professional organizations have tried to regulate it, but lost the war. We know have actual engineering programs that focus on software and 6-week bootcamps graduating people who claim to be "Software Engineers", so add it to the list of appropriated words right next to "Geek".

Right, "geek" should go back to the original definition: a person who bites the head off of a chicken in a carnival show.

  And he is a foole, a sotte, and a geke also,
  Which choseth a place vnto the same to go,
  And where diuers wayes lead thither directly
  He choseth the worst and most of ieopardie

https://www.otago.ac.nz/english-linguistics/tudor/BarcEclogu...

The attitude on (mostly American) HN is against licensing bodies, as far as I've seen in the past.

If you saw, or were exposed to, how many thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours it takes native professionals to get licensed to do hair braiding or cutting, you'd be disenfranchised, too.

Native professional like native-born American?

In my case I pay about 300 CAD a year to EGBC and have not heard from my colleagues that getting a P.Eng in BC is a significant time-sink. You have to have 4 years of work experience, get your work certified, and then do a couple exams. I would believe dozens of hours, but not hundreds.

Maybe it's a generational thing. In the olden days, Open Source was basically GPL. But nowadays, Open Source is basically BSD.

So I get it that all the npm developers don't really consider that some licenses might be restrictive.

So, I’m unclear on this if, and I don’t know if this is true, TikTok just creates a UI that “execs” commands to an unmodified OBS executable cli - What is their actual responsibility here?

They are distributing the OBS executable, therefore they have an obligation to also distribute the source to those same people on request, and to let them know about their rights to receive the source under the GPL.

If OBS really is running standalone, then that is the extent of their responsibilities. If on the other-hand, OBS is being combined with other software to create a derivative work, then they must distribute the full source of that derivative work as well. What constitutes a derivative work is more complicated. It is ultimately a decision for courts, though many folks (including FSF) have opinions on what should and shouldn't be considered a derivative work.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29592556.

Most likely that's the reason of OBS' code ending up in TikTok's product. Some engineer disregarded the license with no insidious intention to steal.

It’s even possible that the developer tried to get the product to be compliant and was ignored.

> self-labelled software engineers

are you implying there should be requirements to label yourself as an engineer? like a degree in engineering ?

This is already a thing in the US.

I wish "software engineer" meant something.

There are CMU/MIT grads using the tittle alongside 3 month bootcamp grads.

I also have to wonder, with the owners of Tik Tok really being ByteDance (字节跳动) if the dissrespect for IP really isn't cultural.

The title isn't what's important, it's your skills and what you can do with them. The MIT grad and 3 month bootcamp grad both have the same opportunity to complete and prove themselves, which is unique to the software field. Lack of artificial barriers and gatekeeping is the very reason why the industry is able to thrive.

But you get these twitter threads that are highly missleading. Would be great to have some quality control at some point.

This doesn't make real engineers look good in the eyes of the public. Same thing with medical profesionnals spreading anti-vaxx news around.