"Who Wrote This?" and What Do We Actually Consider Authorship?

Question

As I was working through the Close Votes Review Queue, I came upon a question beginning like this:

I just cloned (Github clone, not literal clone) someone's Tic-Tac-Toe game and I was originally going to make a pull request, but I ended up making too many changes, the code is simply unrecognizable now.

The reason this question came up in this queue was that somebody had flagged it with Off-topic - Authorship of Code, for which I felt I was unable to correctly decide whether it was appropriate or not. On the one hand, the original code is certainly not the product of the asker's own creativity. On the other hand, he does argue that he made so many changes that the code became something different from the original authors creation, and was asking mostly about code style issues, which constitutes a standard review point.

As a quick reminder, here is the close reason description as it comes up in the Close > Off-topic dialog box:

Authorship of code: Since Code Review is a community where programmers improve their skills through peer review, we require that the code be posted by an author or maintainer of the code, that the code be embedded directly, and that the poster know why the code is written the way it is.

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How should we deal with this problem of "whose code is this"? Where do we draw the line between acceptable for review and off-topic?

Answer 1

I think the close vote is inappropriate.

The close reason says "author or maintainer". In this case I think it makes sense to assume that the poster is the maintainer of the cloned code, especially if the code has diverged so much that the original is unrecognizable due to the changes.

That close reason intends to filter out questions asking to review someone else's code, without taking ownership of the code, or without understanding how it works, or looking for explanations about the code. That doesn't seem to be the case here.

Answer 2

There isn't enough information to say. The requirement is that the poster needs to be the person who can license the code under the cc by-sa 3.0 with attribution required license. Can this person do that? If not, the question should be closed.

If so, then it shouldn't be (at least not for that reason).

As written in the question, we don't have enough information to say one way or the other. The asker copied code from a github repository. We don't know what right the poster had to do so.

A simple solution would be if the original code were already licensed under a compatible license. However, we can't determine that in this case, as there is no license posted that I found at the current commit.

Answer 3

I think it should be closed for that reason.

Authorship of code: Since Code Review is a community where programmers improve their skills through peer review, we require that the code be posted by an author or maintainer of the code, that the code be embedded directly, and that the poster know why the code is written the way it is.

If you read just the description, then I can see why you wouldn't think it should be:

• we require that the code be posted by an author or maintainer of the code

  The poster is the author of some of the code. And is the maintainer for their fork.

• that the code be embedded directly

  The code has been embedded into the question.

• and that the poster know why the code is written the way it is.

  They wrote some of the code, and so likely know why they programmed it that way.

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However if you click the link for "posted by an author or maintainer of the code" then you should see:

For moral, practical, and legal reasons, we are only able to review code that you wrote or code that you maintain. Code Review is not the place to ask about someone else's code.

I'll go through if it's off-topic for these reasons:

• Moral: We're not codecrap.com. However the user isn't here to shame the other author.
• Practical: It's not helpful to tell people that don't understand code how to improve code. The OP here knows what the code is doing however.

• Legal: The OP forked a close source repo. And has now modified the code. But not just that, they relicensed the code to CC BY-SA 3.0 by posting on here.

  And so as the link says:

  If it is not your code, then you have no authority to give away the licensing for it.

  And so should be off-topic according to our rules.