Showing posts with label James Harvey. Show all posts
Showing posts with label James Harvey. Show all posts

Thursday 29 January 2015

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

Saturday 24 January 2015

Follow-up to "Imitation might be the sincerest form of flattery, but..."

G'day:
A few days back I got a bit stroppy with a plagiarist: "Imitation might be the sincerest form of flattery, but...".

I note that James has deleted the page(s) in question.

Instead of simply citing the work properly (ie: put the creative commons attribution on it).

How weird is that? It seems to me it was not an exercise in helping the community, it was an exercise in bigging himself up. Via knocking-off someone else's work.

Dubious.

Still: all's well that ends well, I guess.

--
Adam

Saturday 17 January 2015

Imitation might be the sincerest form of flattery, but...

... out and out plagiarism sux.

G'day:
As you hopefully know, a coupla months back I wrote a document "Documentation for CFScript". This document is on GitHub for everyone to reference and collaborate with: CFScript documentation.

Please note that anything written on this blog is copyrighted, and that repository on GitHub is specifically not licensed (ie: there is no license.md). This means I do not actively give licence for people to do with it what they like. With no licence, the usual copyright laws apply automatically.

Update

Actually I just noticed I licensed that specific work under Creative Commons (it's inline in the doc). So despite my notice for James to stop using copyrighted material, provided he posts the creative commons notice on his blog, that'll be fine. Well it'll get him off the hook. I still don't think what he has done is "fine".


TBH, my position is that if people ask to use stuff I write, I will almost certainly say "yeah, go for it... just attribute me appropriately". But... you know... ask first.