Query regarding best practices to credit original developers

pallav12 · January 13, 2020, 6:56am

Hello Everyone,
I have created a processing library rainbow, its about creating an abstraction layer over fun challenges of Coding train. So you can play around with different examples. For that I have taken code from coding train GitHub, So I want to credit coding train and @shiffman back in some way. Can someone guide me what’s the best practice for that. I had added coding train as author in Javadoc.
Also please give feedback on rainbow.

kll · January 12, 2020, 1:33pm

and why you do that?

( download Rainbow.zip just now )
pls also note that your 1.5 example not work here.

pallav12 · January 12, 2020, 2:15pm

I am sorry that’s a weird error… if you just copy and paste same code in new sketch it’ll work, i’ll fix and update it today only…

because I thought it’ll be nice for new comers because they’ll have something up and running easily.

Thanks a lot for review

kll · January 12, 2020, 2:43pm

well nice, possibly,
but sorry, my private thinking what we need here is different,

what you actually do with making a library is,
hiding educational material from people
who want learn coding,

still it might be usable as a teaser " look what you can do with processing …"

( that you want learn making libraries is a good thing )
i just think you picked the wrong material.

pallav12 · January 12, 2020, 3:01pm

Makes perfect sense, i’ll take care from next time!!, can you advice me how to credit coding train back, as I have used their code.

kll · January 12, 2020, 5:05pm

no, that would be for the foundation and legally more versed PRO’s

but i ask you independently,

make examples for each of the “lessons” you packed,
and in your examples code header make a
attribute to the author
and a link

to the video
to the coding train original code
to the code in your library

so the user have a minimal chance to go back “ON THE LEARNING TRAIN”

jeremydouglass · January 27, 2020, 10:07pm

@pallav12 – thank you so much for creating a resource for the community, sharing it, and asking how to best credit the work you are building on.

Here are some recommendations:

don’t cite a github account (https://github.com/codingtrain) – instead cite specific github repos. CodingTrain has 47 repositories – how am I supposed to find where your code came from? A good principle of citation is – make it easy for people to check your sources.
Now that you are citing specific repos – they have open source licenses! For example, the coding train website repo is under the MIT License. https://github.com/CodingTrain/website/blob/master/LICENSE If you create something based on it you need to abide by its terms.
Keep in mind that, when in doubt, you can contact the author. For example, if you wanted to license under different terms, the author could give you permission. Or, if you want to credit in a way that they prefer, ask directly. You can use this forum – but I’d actually recommend pinging Dan via email, github, or opening an issue with your question about reuse on the appropriate coding train repo.

In addition I’d suggest adding a paragraph to your README about why people should use this. “creating an abstraction layer over fun challenges of Coding train” could go in the README, but that isn’t clear. Now that you have abstracted SnakeGame… what? I import a SnakeGame as an encapsulated object into another sketch… so that I can…?

In addition to an explanation, a concrete example of repurposing, compositing, or just previewing these library elements might help people get what it is for and why they would use it.