Plagiarism from msn-pecan

[Peter Lawler]

On 05/08/09 09:12, Felipe Contreras wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 1:42 AM, Peter Lawler<bleeter at gmail.com>  wrote:

>> It's clear that khc wasn't wholly suggesting the censorship possibility.
>
> He didn't suggest any other possibility either, which makes the
> comment negatively charged.
So the heck what. Boo hoo. Have a cry to yourself, then grow your 
hypocritical butt up and smell the roses. Heck, I know about hypocrisy, 
I invented most of it around #pidgin! Heck, I have a hard enough time 
getting my head around the fact this bitchfest is all over a freaking 
CLOSED PROTOCOL AARGHARHGARHGAHRGAHGAR.

>>> Did you know the idea would work? How? And why didn't you mentioned it
>> in the bug report?
>> Yeah right, how about you don't let your imagination fly and go for the most
>> reasonable explanation: maybe it was something called 'intuition'
>
> How exactly am I letting my imagination fly? I am not even suggesting
> *anything*, I'm just asking questions (in this particular mail). Since
> khc has not answered my questions I'm not stepping away from my claim.
You've made some very serious potentially slanderous, libellous and 
defamatory claims about plagiarisms - if that's not the act of a flying 
imagination, I dunno what is.

> There's never a requirement to act ethically, it's always something
> merely desirable.
Please re-read this statement and your other statements which I believe 
to be slanderous, libellous and defamatory. I would say that you've not 
been all that ethical in your claim either. The correct course of action 
when claiming theft is to take it to the appropriate peoples, not to 
have a cry and a moan in IRC/mail list/blog/mummy and daddy.

(going to change some order here)
> You are putting words in khc's mouth and making assumptions. I've
> never heard khc answer my questions, and quite frankly the evidence
> clearly suggests he had no idea the issue was going to be fixed until
> he saw our validation.
I didn't want to believe it, but you really do hate people making 
intuitive guesses. I suspect it's because your questions are so loaded, 
negatively charged and prejudiced that he can't be bothered. I know from 
observing the devs and cpw's I have, they would appear to be of the 
frame of mind that they can't be bothered with your prejudice and 
bigotry. The difference is, I really don't give a flying hoot about what 
people think of me or the consequences of my spiteful comments. Hence, 
without a second thought I'll call a spade something to dig a hole in 
the ground.

 >> All things considered, is it really any
>> wonder that you've been treated with the contempt you've received?
>> </rhetorical>

 > Yes, I'm interested on this because:
 > a) the bug has more than 6 years
 > b) it affects many users, it's very annoying, and it's hard to
 > reproduce reliably
 > c) it was a great coincidence that it was fixed one week after msn-pecan
 > d) we (not just me) spent a considerable amount of time investigating
 > and validating
 > e) the previous "intuitive fix" was clearly labeled as such, and the
 > bug was not closed, but now it was labeled as a definitive fix with no
 > explanation at all

> Refuse to have anything to do with the default msn prpl? I freaking
> wrote it. Here is an analysis of the current (2.4.7) code:
> http://felipec.wordpress.com/2009/08/05/who-wrote-pidgins-msn-not-who-you-think/
>
> The top contributors who's lines of code are still used:
> felipec: 42%
> qulogic: 18%
> chipx86: 10%
> khc: 7%
> typ0: 5%
> mayuan: 5%
> other: 13%
All this says is that you wrote crap code and can't be arsed supplying 
fixes when you know full well what the fix would be. Further, it says 
that you'd rather abuse the current developers from the outside rather 
than be a team player and get it fixed in tree. Finally, the numbers are 
meaningless. Without an examination of quality of code and amount of 
effort required to fix any bugs written by any author, or knowledge of 
any friendly unattributed code borrowing between authors, they don't 
mean jack. Statistics can be made to say pretty much anything one wants.

> I'm not stepping away from my claim. I accept that khc had the same
> idea -- just like many other people before him
Then it's not exactly plagiarism and theft of msn-pecan or anything else 
in particular.

 > -- but just like
> everybody else, he didn't make the commit until he knew the idea would
> work -- as evident in the commit message --, now the question remains
> open: How did he know? The evidence points out that it was because of
> msn-pecan's work, and although I'm open to other possibilities, that's
> where my bet is.

I doubt you credit the precise K&R page (or any other inspirational 
source) with every commit you do (I'd hate to think of crediting a 'for' 
loop every time), so just get your hand off it and give up. I guess I'll 
just never understand why you're attempting to destroy khc's career over 
this and why you refuse to accept that others think you're wrong, dead 
wrong.

Sure, 'Never ascribe to malice what can be put down to stupidity', 
although in this case I'd say 'Never ascribe to malice what can be put 
down to reaching the same engineering conclusion based upon observing 
other engineer's experiences who freely give their experiences away'.