How TaxCloud Stole My Code and How I'm Doing Something About It

Re:How TaxCloud Stole My Code and How I'm Doing Something Ab... by autarch on Sunday October 14, 2012 @12:46AM (#4650679)

Looking at the examples it's really hard to know if this stuff was copied. How else would you write this sort of stuff? This seems like really simple, straightforward code.

A lot of it seems to be about creating a hash based on a well-defined data type. Is there some other way of doing this that makes sense in Ruby?

Similarly, he points out similar variable names. If you have a variable containing an API key what do you call this besides "api_key"?

Maybe these are just poorly chosen examples, but if these are the best evidence the author has I don't think there's grounds for flipping out quite yet.

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Re:How TaxCloud Stole My Code and How I'm Doing Something Ab... by zhuzhuor on Sunday October 14, 2012 @12:51AM (#4650690)

IMHO, the unnecessary require statement is a fairly solid evidence.

And programming is like English writing, no one will actually produce the same code. You can try by yourself

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Re:How TaxCloud Stole My Code and How I'm Doing Something Ab... by petercooper on Sunday October 14, 2012 @01:01AM (#4650719)

A few things stand out as distinctive in terms of Ruby style. For example, for self.send "#{sym}=", val, I'd much prefer to see send :"#{sym}=", val. And "sym" is a poor choice of variable name semantically when it's really referring to an attribute name.

If I were writing this, I'd probably have a single hash that defines the SOAP names and internal names then dynamically create those accessors and dynamically create the hash in to_hash rather than have repetition. DRY and all that. So there are other ways to go about it.

There's not a great deal to go on, of course, but the chance of two independent Rubyists stumbling across an identical solution syntax-wise is far from high (though is not minuscule, either.)

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Re:How TaxCloud Stole My Code and How I'm Doing Something Ab... by drewtemp on Sunday October 14, 2012 @07:42AM (#4651244)

Valid point. When I first looked at the code I knew the initialize code was fairly common, but then I noticed the unnecessary require. I started to explore a bit more and noticed that the style changes from the copied code[1]. They also place their require statements immediately after module declaration[1]. Not to mention the use of single quotes vs double quotes.

1 - https://github.com/donnen/TaxCloud/blob/b036594969f045660a79...

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