Upwork has ignored & deleted my report for Fr...

0a1a212c · ‎01-20-2018

Hi all,

I've had a freelancer who has committed fraud by selling me an open source software, directly from GitHub. I reported this activity 8 days ago. Upwork has not responded to this ticket and furthermore, the ticket now seems to be deleted, and the freelancer's profile still seems to be active.

Any help is appreciated, thanks.

kochubei_valeria · ‎01-20-2018

Hi Francis,

Sorry about the delayed response. I'll follow up with the team about the ticket you are referring to and they'll update you directly.

~ Valeria

0a1a212c · ‎01-23-2018

Hi Valeria,

I'm still waiting on Upwork's official stance on this matter, unless I've missed your response - thank you.

stefan-c · ‎01-21-2018

It’s perfectly fine to sell open source software (modified or not). You are free to use whatever open source software was sold to you, and you are free to give/sell it to other people. The point of “open source software” is that you can do pretty much whatever you want to do with them (some conditions might apply, depending on the license type). It is certainly NOT FRAUD to sell open source software.

On fixed price contacts you’re paying for the end product. If the product the freelancer has delivered is working as you requested, the freelancer in entitled to be paid for the product regardless if (s)he sold you an open source software (modified or not).

On hourly contracts you’re paying for the freelancer’s time. If the freelancer charged you for time that was not spent working on your project, you should have field a dispute.

alphazomgy · ‎01-21-2018

@Stefan Burn! Lol

0a1a212c · ‎01-22-2018

Yes, I understand that open source software generally, can be sold by anyone - but not always. There are different types of licenses, and ones that can prohibit monetisation/commercialisation with or without attribution. This particular repository on GitHub unfortunately does not explicitly specify a license.

It is definitely not ok to just take someone else's code then claim the code is original, that there has been X hours put into it then take someone's money.

Especially in a marketplace like Upwork, I don't think the Community Leaders should be guarding this type of behaviour from freelancers, I do think it's toxic for the community in the long run.

stefan-c · ‎01-22-2018

No open source license restricts commercial use. Prashant has shared a link to the Open Source Definition a few post down the line. I’m going to share the annotated version of the OSD, maybe it makes more sense (go to #6). If a software license prohibits use (for commercial purposes or otherwise), copy, modifications, redistribution (including selling), then that software is not open source.

Yes, there are some open source licenses like the GNU AGPL that require enhancements to be made publicly available, but those do not restrict you from using the software.

If a software does not have a license attached (aka the “No License”), then that software is NOT open source. The creator of a “No License” software retains the copyright by default, and you have no permission to use, copy, share or modify that software.

—

It’s worth clarifying that “Community Leaders/Gurus” are not working for, or being paid by Upwork. We are freelancers and/or clients, we generally try to help, and the opinions we express are our own and do not reflect Upwork’s position. Valeria on the other hand is working for Upwork. You can tell when a person is working for Upwork by the logo displayed besides their name.

—

The above being said -

In your initial message you stated that a freelancer sold you an open source software, and you were claiming that was fraud. The replies you got were based on that initial message. We are not guarding and/or endorsing any bad behaviour - it is simply NOT fraud or anything wrong with selling an open source software.

In this 2nd message you’re saying you have found the software on a GitHub repository and it did not have a license attached. This technically means the software is a “No License”, but then again, the owner of that repository might have copied the software from another source and removed the license file. You have no definite way of knowing where did the freelancer got the software from, and if the freelancer had permission to sell the software.

I guess it would be fine (as in not breaking the community guidelines) to share the GitHub repo link. I’m kind of curious about it.

0a1a212c · ‎01-22-2018

You are correct in saying that a third party selling open source software does not consititute fraud automatically. This discussion has really gone off on a tangent - I would not come to Upwork forums to discuss open source licenses.

Again here are the facts:

a freelancer has lied saying that he/she wrote the source code
the freelancer has claimed X hours for it
I paid for it
I was doing personal research, and came across the GitHub repo purely by coincidence
I found out the code provided was virtually exactly the same (with 1-2 character difference like line breaks etc.)
Freelancer has admitted fault

I am not saying it is fraud because it is open source.

Lying for one's financial gain constitutes fraud.

No open source license provides protection in such circumstance.

Copyright still is applicable here however, this really isn't a technical issue, it is a VERY SIMPLE issue.

bobafett999 · ‎01-21-2018

@Francis K wrote:
Hi all,

I've had a freelancer who has committed fraud by selling me an open source software, directly from GitHub.

Did the code work for you? If so give the freelancer the agreed amount. Becoming familiar with Github and learn how to use the code snippets requires skills. As far as I can tell, nothing on Github can be used 'as is'....It does require effort to make it work/test in your environment.

Unless of course you are trying to use this as an excuse not pay.

How did you find that out anyway? Did the freelancer keep the open source license credit in the code? If so he is being ethical and gave credit where it belonged. In addition, he was protecting you from someone else claiming your stole their code. This way you can always point to the credit as well as github repository as a source.

0a1a212c · ‎01-22-2018

I found out just by purely researching the topic, by complete coincidence. I was furious however Upwork is supposedly saying this is ok.

kat303 · ‎01-21-2018

@Francis K wrote:
Hi all,

I've had a freelancer who has committed fraud by selling me an open source software, directly from GitHub. I reported this activity 8 days ago. Upwork has not responded to this ticket and furthermore, the ticket now seems to be deleted, and the freelancer's profile still seems to be active.

Any help is appreciated, thanks.

----------------

That's what you do with open source code/programs. Once you get it, you can do anything you want with it, such as modify it, add to it, or sell it to someone else. And the someone else, can do the same (modify it, add to it or sell it to someone else. That's why it's called open source. It's available to whoever wants it. Your freelancer has NOT commited fraud. The reported ticket youi submitted was probably deleted because Upwork didn't find any fraud in what the freelancer did. And that's also probably why their profile is still up.

0a1a212c · ‎01-22-2018

I still think it's an act of fraud to take someone else's code and claim the hours one did not spend on it.

iamchunchunchun · ‎01-22-2018

I don't really get it. Was that a fixed price contract or an hourly contract?

If it's an hourly contract and the freelancer did not spend the time doing your project (for example, if you saw the freelancer browsing facebook in the screenshot), then you should have all the right to get the money back.

If it's a fixed price contract, then you should not care how he/she completed the project, as long as it was legal and ethical.

0a1a212c · ‎01-22-2018

It was an hourly project.

The freelancer claimed the code was written by himself/herself and claimed X hours for it, which I promptly paid for.

I found the repo by complete accident and the source code was virtually unmodified.

tlsanders · ‎01-22-2018

@Francis K wrote:
It was an hourly project.

The freelancer claimed the code was written by himself/herself and claimed X hours for it, which I promptly paid for.

I found the repo by complete accident and the source code was virtually unmodified.

Did the freelancer fake the screenshots and time memos, or how was he able to slip this past during the review period for those hours?

0a1a212c · ‎01-22-2018

The freelancer had already worked with me previously. So there was a sense of trust. He/she was quite demanding of the money actually, and asked the hours to be put in manually.

bobafett999 · ‎01-22-2018

@Francis K wrote:
I still think it's an act of fraud to take someone else's code and claim the hours one did not spend on it.

Let me give you a lesson in What Open Source code is.

"Can Open Source software be used for commercial purposes?

Absolutely. All Open Source software can be used for commercial purpose; the Open Source Definition guarantees this. You can even sell Open Source software.

go to opensource.dot.org/faq#restrict

source: https://opensource.org/faq#restrict

tlsanders · ‎01-22-2018

Question for all the more technologically-inclined folks here that are saying there's no issue here...

Do I correctly understand that you're saying that if a client hires someone and says "I need you to build a platform that does X," and the freelancer knows of open source code that does X out of the box, it is considered ethical for him to say "Cool, that will be $5,000," hop over and spend three minutes cutting and pasting or whatever you do, and then sell the client the free code for $5,000?

iamchunchunchun · ‎01-22-2018

@Tiffany S wrote:
Question for all the more technologically-inclined folks here that are saying there's no issue here...

Do I correctly understand that you're saying that if a client hires someone and says "I need you to build a platform that does X," and the freelancer knows of open source code that does X out of the box, it is considered ethical for him to say "Cool, that will be $5,000," hop over and spend three minutes cutting and pasting or whatever you do, and then sell the client the free code for $5,000?

Obviously I'm not a software engineer, but my standard is:

1) I think it's actually fine to tell the client that I would charge $5,000. I earn that $5,000 by having the knowledge about how to solve the problem.

2) I think it's not acceptable to tell the client that I would charge $5,000, as I charge $50 per hour and I need 100 hours to get this project done. That's just lying.

tlsanders · ‎01-22-2018

@Hiu Chun L wrote:
@Tiffany S wrote:
Question for all the more technologically-inclined folks here that are saying there's no issue here...

Do I correctly understand that you're saying that if a client hires someone and says "I need you to build a platform that does X," and the freelancer knows of open source code that does X out of the box, it is considered ethical for him to say "Cool, that will be $5,000," hop over and spend three minutes cutting and pasting or whatever you do, and then sell the client the free code for $5,000?

Obviously I'm not a software engineer, but my standard is:
1) I think it's actually fine to tell the client that I would charge $5,000. I earn that $5,000 by having the knowledge about how to solve the problem.

2) I think it's not acceptable to tell the client that I would charge $5,000, as I charge $50 per hour and I need 100 hours to get this project done. That's just lying.

That seems super-shady to me. The first scenario might be technically legal, but I can't see how it could possibly be ethical.

I'm in an entirely different field, but if someone came to me and wanted to hire me to write a book instructing their employees on how to use a software platform and I knew that there was a really good, detailed walkthrough available on the manufacturer's website, I'd tell the prospective client to take a look at that before hiring anyone, as they might well not need me.

bobafett999 · ‎01-22-2018

@Tiffany S wrote:
@Hiu Chun L wrote:
@Tiffany S wrote:
Question for all the more technologically-inclined folks here that are saying there's no issue here...

Do I correctly understand that you're saying that if a client hires someone and says "I need you to build a platform that does X," and the freelancer knows of open source code that does X out of the box, it is considered ethical for him to say "Cool, that will be $5,000," hop over and spend three minutes cutting and pasting or whatever you do, and then sell the client the free code for $5,000?

Obviously I'm not a software engineer, but my standard is:
1) I think it's actually fine to tell the client that I would charge $5,000. I earn that $5,000 by having the knowledge about how to solve the problem.

Tiffany: Having the knowledge is the key phrase. When I was younger this is the story I had heard. There was a technical problem in a plant. One of the main pipe was breaking blah blah blah. They hired a consultat for $1,000 to fix the problem. The consultat came spent about 15 mins. assesing the situation, pulled out a chalk and put a X on the pipe and told the engineer to tie the pipe at the X. The engineer was mad that for 15 mins.of work you are charging $1,000> The consltat told him that,:The chalk was $1, and $999 was to know where to put the X".

The bottom line is that people spend time learning, honning their skills so that they can effectively deliver a useful solution. Here the programmer has the knowledge about where to find the piece of code, based on his experience he knew if that will work or not. He may have spent some time testing it...... If he was unethical he could have changed/rewritten/inserted some useless fluff in the code and raked up hours.

Now let me expand on the example you gave about instruction manual. Yes if you copied verbatim that would be unethical. However, if you were to tell the client that you spent X hours and found this on manufacturer's website and spent some time going through it to see if it met client's requirements that would be ethical. Or you can say that this is the manual, it sounds bit confusing. I can modify/rephrase certain sections for Y hours - wouldn't that be ethical?

Here the OP did not know if there was a solution or what that would cost. It is only after he was delivered the solution he was 'motivated' to find the source of the solution. And I have seen in many programs an ethical technician will leave the credits/source intact. That is the unwritten honor system among technologists (and people who frequent github, or codepen or stack overflow are generally no thieves). And the OP did say (much later) that few lines were changed. May be those few lines were like where to put the X.

0a1a212c · ‎01-22-2018

I would be more than happy to show you what exactly was changed.

A software method of comparing 2 different codes called 'diff' would indicate a line change even if there is a difference in the line break character (for example Windows vs Mac).

The changes are negligible and Upwork has all the evidence (which is supposedly now deleted). But I have a copy.

I do note your accusational tone towards me Prashant however I do not see why it is necessary.

petra_r · ‎01-23-2018

Was it a fixed rate or an hourly contract?

tlsanders · ‎01-23-2018

@Petra R wrote:
Was it a fixed rate or an hourly contract?

Hourly with manual time.

0a1a212c · ‎01-22-2018

I also would like to point out that I am not complaining about peanuts here. The freelancer is one of the highest charging freelancers I've worked with and the matter of the fact is he/she lied about the hours to get money from the client.

tlsanders · ‎01-22-2018

Prashant, I agree with some of that, but I think there is a limit. The $1,000 to identify the right place to tie the pipe seems entirely reasonable to me, because that's a highly specialized ability in a critical situation. On the other hand, there are, at a minimum, hundreds of thousands of people who could have located some pre-existing code (or the pre-existing manual).

Expertise has a dollar value, sure--that's why I may get paid twice as much to write a blog post as someone else writing a post of the same length on the same subject, even though it probably takes me half as long to write it. But, twice as much and 1,000 times as much are different.

In all of your examples of ethical ways to approach the situation, there was full disclosure to the client. This client hired someone to write code and it seems that he was told that the freelancer had written code and it had taken many hours to do so.

iamchunchunchun · ‎01-23-2018

Tiffany, thank you so much!
Honestly I never thought this would be unethical, and your reply really made me think.

stefan-c · ‎01-22-2018

@Tiffany S wrote:
Question for all the more technologically-inclined folks here that are saying there's no issue here...

Do I correctly understand that you're saying that if a client hires someone and says "I need you to build a platform that does X," and the freelancer knows of open source code that does X out of the box, it is considered ethical for him to say "Cool, that will be $5,000," hop over and spend three minutes cutting and pasting or whatever you do, and then sell the client the free code for $5,000?

Tiffany, the freelancer in your example deceives the client into thinking he’s going to (personally) build the platform when he has no intention of doing so, and will later represent the OSS as the platform he has build, even though he did not do any work that can be considered “building” the platform. What the freelancer in your example is doing is borderline fraud. More so, the client kinda explicitly asked (“I need you to”) the platform be built by the freelancer (itself), so the client could claim the freelancer has not performed the work he agreed to do and was hired/paid for.

Your example has nothing to do with what we (the technologically-inclined folks) were saying. At the point most of our replies were posted (except for my 2nd reply), there was only the initial message from the OP. The later “clarifications” from the OP were posted after we have replied (except for my 2nd reply).

In his initial message, the OP pretty much claims that selling (unmodified) OSS is fraud. Our replies address that claim. What we were saying is that selling OOS is perfectly fine, which it is. We’re certainly not saying that lying/deceiving.. or being unethical is fine.

tlsanders · ‎01-23-2018

Stefan, everything you've said here makes sense, but let me take it one step further.

What if a client came to you with a large budget and described exactly what he needed done, and you were already aware of an existing solution that would solve his problems with no work on your part (or, perhaps, 15 minutes of work).

Would you consider it ethical to quote that client a $20,000 fee (using that as a figure that might be reasonable for custom building the solution), then spend a few minutes passing him an existing solution that was available for free without disclosing how you had solved his problem and collection $20,000?

0a1a212c · ‎01-22-2018

Prashant, yes, I understand open source software can be sold, and a third party is able to sell it.

I've been an open source developer for over a decade - this discussion has really gone off on a tangent.

Yes - perhaps my initial message makes the discussion point a bit vague. The GitHub repository does not explicitly specify an open source license so it is hard to get into the techical details however, the VP of GitHub has noted that such repositories are still bound by Copyright: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4007674/whats-the-default-license-of-code-published-at-github

The matter of the fact is the freelancer has lied about the hours, and have provided me code that is unmodified. Lying for one's fincial gain is, a fraud.

Cambridge Dictionary: the crime of getting money by deceiving people

Oxford Dictionary: Wrongful or criminal deception intended to result in financial or personal gain.

Upwork has ignored & deleted my report for Fraud