CodeQuality
Post #4189 · source on Telegram
Group project duel: citing sources card defeats anti-plagiarism argument in code copy
Description
Four-panel Yu-Gi-Oh! anime meme. Panel 1: Seto Kaiba smirks while holding a duel card; the card area is overlaid with the text "ME ARGUING AGAINST COPYING 90% OF PROJECT" in bold white capitals. Panel 2: Yugi raises his own card confidently, no additional text. Panel 3: Close-up of Yugi’s eyes and card with overlaid text "GROUP MATES TELLING ME WE WILL CITE SOURCES". Panel 4: Kaiba is flung backward, eyes wide, mouth open, dramatically losing the duel. The humor highlights a common academic coding scenario where teammates justify massive copy-paste reuse by promising to add citations, touching on plagiarism, code quality, and collaboration ethics familiar to developers and CS students
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10Comment deleted
Adding “// credit: StackOverflow” above 10k lines of GPL won’t fool the license scanner - or legal - when they summon Blue-Eyes White Subpoena
It's all fun and games citing Stack Overflow until you realize half your codebase has conflicting MIT, GPL, and 'I found this on a random blog in 2009' licenses, and now legal wants a word about that production deployment you pushed last Friday
Citing the source doesn't change the license - but in group projects the only license that matters is the professor's attention span
When your teammates think 'git blame' is a citation format and Stack Overflow is a bibliography. Sure, you'll cite sources - right after you copy-paste that entire authentication system, rename a few variables, and call it 'inspired by industry best practices.' At least in production, nobody asks for a works cited page, just a postmortem when it inevitably breaks
Protip: “We’ll cite the repo in the README” isn’t a dependency strategy - it’s how you accidentally adopt GPL and an on-call policy for code you don’t understand
Me: No copy-paste. Team: Hold my 'npm i the-wheel' - now it's architectural dependency debt
"We'll cite sources" is how you end up with a bibliography-shaped SBOM, surprise GPL in prod, and a codebase that's 90% copy, 0% context
I don't get it? Comment deleted
if i got it right, meme about group wants to steal 90% of foreign project and leave a link to original source instead of creating something unique Comment deleted
Isn't it like free and open-source software is created? Comment deleted