carpeaqua

The Internet can bring out the worst in people.

This morning Andreas Linde, the developer of the excellent Hockey and CrashReporter frameworks for iOS, tweeted a link to a Github commit by Devin Ross that explicitly updated the header copyrights of two of CrashReporter’s framework files to no longer mention Andreas and to instead mention Devin as the creator and copyright holder of the file.

This is wrong for a variety of reasons. First, Andreas was kind enough to share all of his hard work with the Internet at large so we can easily add native crash reporting to our app. Second, he gave it away for free.¹ Whereas Windows developers frequently sell third-party code components, on Mac and iOS we enjoy sharing them on Github for free in exchange for a little bit of gratitude in the about box.

What happened after Andreas tweeted the link is what rubbed me the wrong way. If you look at the commit log, you’ll see over 30 commit comments underneath it that don’t do much more than tell Devin what a thieving jerk he truly is. It is noble to come to Andreas’ defense when he has been wronged, but I can’t help but have a dirty feeling when I see post after post just piling on with so much negativity and vitriol.

I have seen a link to Devin’s snafu pop up several times today in my twitter stream, so I’m confident that many of the better developers in our community are well aware of his mistake. Public shame like that is more than enough. Taking to the comments of his Github page is akin to driving by his house and throwing eggs at the door and toilet paper in the trees. It is easy to pile on with an angry mob when you feel like someone you respect has been wronged. That doesn’t make it the right course of action.

What no one has done as far as I know is seek out Devin to ask him why he removed Andreas and Kent from the credits of the source file. It is much easier to just pile on and join the angry mob. I have emailed Devin and asked him to either write up a blog post explaining what happened or let me publish a response here. I’ll update this post if he responds.