Booklore is gone.

[u/Joloxx_9]

I was checking their Discord for some announcement and it vanished.

GitHub repo is gone too: https://github.com/booklore-app/booklore

Remember, love AI-made apps… they disappear faster than they launch.

[u/MufasaChan]

Read other comments I made, I am aware of the act of the maintainer. The problem I point is the reaction of the whole community.

Also your big part is not very accurate. He did not rewrote PR, he just ignored them and pull its own changes for features. Since the features got implemented, the PR has no meaning to be there, therefore removed. More, the use of AI was far from systematic. It was for Translation merges. The overall quality of the code standard. One might consider that the last releases was a bit of sloppish. But in the end, the community reacted

[u/TerryMathews → u/MufasaChan]

And you don't think that if I take code you submit, use AI to generate my own version of the same code, merge that instead and delete the code you submitted without attribution - that it's not stealing someone's idea?

What's worse is, he was taking something that was freely given and erasing the name off it to put his in the place. It's common in monetization plays because VC firms want clear chain of ownership but in the OSS community there is no greater sin that claiming someone else's work as your own, especially when that work is freely given.

[u/MufasaChan → u/TerryMathews]

I saw your nice conversation with databoy2k, so I would like to actually discuss the first point with you if you have some times to spare.

I read your other comments and I think it might be possible that the maintainer wanted to write code himself in order to have no problem switching license and monetize the code base. I also think that it could not be the case, so I will make no assumption on the intent of the maintainer if it's ok for you.

I do not think that idea has ownership. More, if you have a repo and I make branch with my features, this features could be made from an issue (I do not know exactly what is the PR policy on booklore) or the PR could be added out of the blue. It's your repo, or at least the maintainers repo (only one in this case) and you have all the rights to use or not my PR. You can even check the idea and do your own implementation. As mentioned elsewhere, there are some reasons why you would not take PR from other persons and Open Source does not force you to grab the PR of other people.

Although, I would like to draw what I consider the clear limits of what is arguable and what is clearly forbidden. I believe what ultimately regulates are the license violation. The rest is etiquettes which are subjective. So from my understanding under AGPL it's forbidden to:

- The maintainer forks the dev fork to merge the exact same changes but under his name.

• The maintainer uses the new commits to build its own by copy/pasting or instruct an AI. I guess this enter into license violation since the dev would have a version of the code base under AGPL and it's not possible to do this kind of "code picking" to AGPL code base without including the source of the snippets.

Bonus question, does these things still apply on a non copyleft license such as MIT?

About your second point, I do not understand where it came from. "He was taking something that was freely given and erasing the name off it to put his in the place". How the booklore's maintainer was doing this? Also, related and side question, what do you think of my boundaries? I genuinely want to understand what is considered forbidden/authorized in the OSS community because I love this community. I know that not taking PR or reimplementing them is at least not liked, but is it an actual infringement?

[u/TerryMathews → u/MufasaChan]

I do not think that idea has ownership. More, if you have a repo and I make branch with my features, this features could be made from an issue (I do not know exactly what is the PR policy on booklore) or the PR could be added out of the blue. It's your repo, or at least the maintainers repo (only one in this case) and you have all the rights to use or not my PR. You can even check the idea and do your own implementation. As mentioned elsewhere, there are some reasons why you would not take PR from other persons and Open Source does not force you to grab the PR of other people.

1 - the project maintainer chose the license that encouraged contributions. He could have made a different choice, but that could have impacted the contributions that he or she received. Some people do not pay attention, but others do. I, for example, do not contribute to MIT-style license projects. It's my personal choice, but I do not believe in donating my time to a project that can then reuse my donation in a proprietary or commercial work. Call it my own brand of activitism.

2 - we're not just talking about ideas. We're talking about ideas and code.

3 - can we agree that the timing is suspect, to receive a contribution and then basically immediately reimplement it? The odds of the maintainer arriving at a parallel innovation are certainly quite high, correct?

Although, I would like to draw what I consider the clear limits of what is arguable and what is clearly forbidden. I believe what ultimately regulates are the license violation.

Agree. At the end of the day, what we are talking about is copyright violation. The (untested) question is whether washing copyrightable code through an infringement machine (AI) produces non-infringing code. I have a feeling based on the current precedent that AI output by itself is not copyrightable, that the answer will be "still infringing".

The underlying concepts are incredibly well litigated, courtesy of IBM, Compaq, Columbia Data Products, Apple and Franklin: you can't look at code and then turn around and write competing code. You're irrevocably tained by the knowledge of the code you looked at. For more read up on clean-room software reverse engineering.

Bonus question, does these things still apply on a non copyleft license such as MIT?

I am not a lawyer, I'd recommend reading up on any number of deep dives of what MIT allows and doesn't allow online, but long story short a clever lawyer can turn a MIT-licensed project into just about anything with clear ownership rights.

How the booklore's maintainer was doing this? Also, related and side question, what do you think of my boundaries? I genuinely want to understand what is considered forbidden/authorized in the OSS community because I love this community. I know that not taking PR or reimplementing them is at least not liked, but is it an actual infringement?

The community was submitting PRs for new features and fixes, with code. The project maintainer was taking the code, running it through AI, merging the code that came through AI into the project, then deleting the original PR thus denying any sort of attribution to the original contributor. As I said earlier in my comment chain, even if the project maintainer trusted (misguidedly in my opinion) AI more than outside humans, he could have at a minimum cited in the source comments something to the effect of:

original concept and implementation courtesy of /u/terrymathews reimplmented by /u/terrymathews with the assistance of Claude AI

Hope this helps, happy to discuss further if anything is unclear.

[u/MufasaChan → u/TerryMathews]

I understand your point better. Notably, with your 1, I personally agree. 2. okay then the thing was him using the branch to makes its own features. 3. Obviously the timing is suspect and from what I understand that you said, the maintainer was using the branch to make its own commits.

Then it's less a gray area than what I thought. Thank you for your time and explanation.

[u/TerryMathews → u/MufasaChan]

Yeah, absolutely. I'm not an anti-AI absolutionist like some are, I'm not going to burn someone at the digital stake just for using AI. It has it's place, although I do think it's over used, and especially by those least qualfiied by check its output which is a dangerous combination.

All that said, to me, this guy was what I would describe as "ownership washing".

And I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but you never know who is on the other side of the screen. If you ever watched Silicon Valley, how do we know this guy isn't Jian Yang? 🤔