Sometimes I’m getting berserk when I see the difference. Difference between the original code and original with some minor modifications. And also when credits to the original authors are not given where I expect them. Especially when credits are not given at all.

For example, let’s see 4 months old piece of code here and nearly the same, but one day old code here. Well, there is a difference. My original code was not good enough and I’m happy that we’ll have a better patch in the ruby gem. But uncredited?

OK, I will not cry for it (since of today, the apology is already in my mailbox and credits are here), but I still wonder what will motivate the others to publish more patches. Do it, publish it and stay uncredited — that’s the clear message for them. Or I’m not getting the whole point. Maybe there is a big difference in my concept of intellectual property and the famous Japanese intellectual property concept.

Last week I had a little chat with the European president of one extremely huge and successful global company. I told him that they should protect some particular things better before their friends from China will copy the company’s current work, improve it a bit and sell to company’s former customers. I named this behaviour Chinese way. He corrected my statement saying that when he was young, they called it the Japanese way, because it was very common to see cars from Detroit copied, improved and being sold by the Japanese companies to the customers in Detroit.

As we all know, those engineers from Detroit were also not credited, but the situation there was a little bit different. They have been paid by the Japanese companies after the WWII and they wanted to help in Japan after introducing the atomic bomb there. Maybe we all should send them some thanksgiving letters for introducing the bomb there, because it started the era of mass copying and bastardizing the euro-american intellectual property concept. Or maybe better, we all should wait for the next release notes.