Sunday, 25 January 2015

Public service announcement: James Harvey / @webdevsourcerer is a systematic plagiarist

G'day:
OK, so not "all's well that ends well" as I thought the other day ("Follow-up to "Imitation might be the sincerest form of flattery, but..."").

Some investigations have taken place (see comments on that article above), and another couple of instances of James Harvey plagiarising other people's work have surfaced:

Firstly this:
Updating Coldfusion 10 to Java 8

Is an almost verbatim copy of this:
Upgrading the JRE used by ColdFusion

But that is just a Stack Overflow answer, and only a coupla paragraphs.

This one however is dreadful: he's ripped off a bunch of Nathan's work, and claimed it has his own:

James's knock-off:
CF-Pagination :: Pagination Made Easy

Nathan's original:
Pagination.cfc

If you look at the code, it's basically identical. Except for stuff like James replacing Nathan's name with his own, and saying things like "This is a ColdFusion Component the Ol'Sourcerer wrote some time back".

Oh (thanks to Big Mad Kev for finding this), he's also ripped of Ray:

Generating Speech with ColdFusion and Java

With his own knock-off:
CF-TTS :: Text-to-Speech with ColdFusion and Java

I am concerned about linking to his blog too much, as it will just give him traffic. However he did take down the article I mentioned the other day, so hopefully these will follow suit too.


James? You're scum, sunshine. And I think people ought to be aware of this.

And to my readers? If you were to Retweet the message below, it would perhaps not be the worst thing you did today, for the integrity of the CFML community. Your decision.


--
Adam
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