Does anyone know how one should properly attribute other users’ Pens that you like and fork?
I forked over three that I really liked and want to study.
The very first thing I did was add a comment at the top of the html page saying who it belongs to.
I didn’t change its name, but when I forked the Pen it automatically put my name in the “a pen by” title. It left the original user’s Pen title name.
I want to make sure I’m not doing something inappropriate. I may want to play with the coding as I study it and learn more, but I want to make sure that I am always giving credit where credit is due.
Legally, there’s no requirement for specific attribution. All public pens are MIT licensed, which doesn’t contain attribution as a requirement. It just requires that the license be kept included, which happens by default if you’re forking it to a new pen.
Ethically, it’s somewhat of a gray area. I’d suggest that at least a comment in the source (HTML or JS) would be reasonable. If you’re using it as a showcase of your own work, a visible attribution and link to the original pen would be better (making it appear that the whole pen was your work would be dishonest and could even be fraudulent in some situations).
Finally, if it’s for an fCC project, you must make sure to adhere to the Academic Honesty Pledge:
“I understand that plagiarism means copying someone else’s work and presenting the work as if it were my own, without clearly attributing the original author.
“I understand that plagiarism is an act of intellectual dishonesty, and that people usually get kicked out of university or fired from their jobs if they get caught plagiarizing.
“Aside from using open source libraries such as jQuery and Bootstrap, and short snippets of code which are clearly attributed to their original author, 100% of the code in my projects was written by me, or along with another camper with whom I was pair programming in real time.
“I pledge that I did not plagiarize any of my Free Code Camp work. I understand that Free Code Camp’s team will audit my projects to confirm this.”
What is a “showcase of my own work?” I guess that is what I’m concerned about. The Pens are on my dashboard. They are not actually mine. Should I add something to the name saying whose it is? How would I add a visible attribution that does not intrusively edit their own code to put something on the visible page? Is there some directory structure where I could put that sort of work and not “showcase” it as mine?
Hey thanks, I added the authors’ name in parentheses after the forked pen’s name, and I also added (in the html comments) <a href= snippet link to their own pen and their name identity. I hope that makes it clear.