Update readme to properly credit Grant Sanderson and revise dismissive tone #4077
Conversation
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In my country that level of fawning would be considered as an illegal neurotoxin.
Purpose of this notice is to state this facts and basic differentiation between these two projects. |
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Kind of expected that reply. Are requests to properly credit original authors considered "fawning" in your country? Here are the facts:
Just give the guy proper credit for god's sake. What legal issues are you talking about? He already open-sourced his work for anyone to fork, why would there be any legal issues? Legal issues appear more-so when authors are not properly credited, in that sense your statement is contradictory. Not saying to use that exact phrasing in the diff, it is a bit maybe too much now that I re-read it, but anyways, it was written in half minute for suggestive purpose, the point is at least make it clear that he's the original creator and that a significant portion of the code here constitutes his original work and the solid foundation of this repo. |
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To be clear I'm more of oppositional spirit in here and not a maintainer. My words has here equally power than yours, not much. That first line was a joke (and maybe a little trap for those who cannot separate ego and objectivity) and to demonstrate that this place is global and what is considered a proper credit, really dependents of your original culture where person has been grew. I just saw those words overly sweet and personal for a technical documentation... Speaking of personal feelings. I am programmer and more I read those millions lines my feelings are less and less grateful (Not a Grant's fault, he never did not market Manim as anything miraculous. His work on teaching and videos is still great.). Lines are not good indication of quality in programming or anything in really. Most times it is a opposite. Maybe original text is little technical and cold, but again this is a technical documentation. Ps. I totally read this 'conflict line' as a legal statement. Btw, legally only technical licence text file is enough and that is there. |
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There is also a fair and honest description of the origin of Manim in the documentation at https://docs.manim.community/en/stable/faq/installation.html which is read by far more people than a |
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"To be clear I'm more of oppositional spirit in here and not a maintainer." - you're basically saying you enjoy debating for its own sake regardless of whether it's part of your responsibility to significantly weigh in. Why not let the maintainers respond first before sarcastically stating that in your country I'd be treated as if I have mental issues? "That first line was a joke (and maybe a little trap for those who cannot separate ego and objectivity) and to demonstrate that this place is global" - and yet again, condescendingly and sarcastically suggesting I have issues in separating ego and objectivity; you're saying that you demonstrate that this place is global, a "community", by replying offensively to its own members, instead of being respectful and constructive when people raise concerns? Cultural differences should not deflect from aspects of fairness and acknowledgment and proper credit is not about being "sweet and personal". "Lines are not good indication of quality in programming or anything in really. Most times it is a opposite." - of course, especially if they're written by a single person over a long time, it's a humongous effort for a single person to let alone build such a tool and effectively use it to make awesome videos, what did you expect, that the docs and software written by a person over the course of 5 years while he's doing youtube videos using it to be bug-free and perfectly documented? This aspect doesn’t negate the foundational weight of Grant’s work. "Maybe original text is little technical and cold, but again this is a technical documentation." - it is cold and readme.md's and home-pages of a tools docs are not purely technical documentation (@uwezi also) they're the front-doors of software tools, what users and contributors see as their first impression, FAQs are usually buried deeper, what do you mean they're accessed by far more users? "it's not like someone tries to hide origin story, link to original repo is just right there" - proper credit is not about providing a link, it's about admitting the foundational role of a creator and not vaguely nodding in their direction while stating the repo here has nothing to do with him, a statement which is simply false. I intended to be a user of this and my first impression based on the readme.md which I've started with like any normal user would, was confusion when reading "not associated in any way with the founder" and then seeing him at the top among the contributors. I opened a PR to suggest a change and start a discussion, debatably it might've been more appropriate to open an issue, but the message is here as a change-request and fact-based discussion is started, whereas what you've done from your very first sentence is deflect from the core issue. It's pretty clear this is going nowhere based on the tone, so I'm going to end the conversation here, I wouldn't be surprised though if other users feel the same way about this, considering also that from 2020 onward since the fork was done, there doesn't seem to be almost any effort done (maybe none) to port any of Grant's subsequent changes, again suggesting an intention to separate and distance this tool from a state where it would otherwise be enriched with additional useful functionalities, instead of ego-based lack of collab (since you brought up ego and objectiveness). |
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This escalated surprisingly quickly. I am open to a discussion to find an improved wording, as long as we can keep things civil. For the record, we are in loose contact with Grant and he endorses the community fork (see, for example, Grant's videos on Manim and his workflow, where he also links to the community project). If he was unhappy about the way he is credited, it would have come up in one of our meetings, and we would have taken care of it already. Now, back to the issue at hand: I think the proposed wording does read a bit warmer (and I do like it), although I personally dislike the usage of "indebted"; but that applies to the current wording as well. I think it does make sense to state explicitly that Grant is not a maintainer of this repository. We should also change the wording on the landing page of the documentation accordingly. Perhaps other community members want to chime in as well; regardless of whether they are active contributors or not. I'd appreciate if this discussion could be conducted without taking jabs at what the community has or has not done, or any further ad-hominem insults. I recognize and appreciate that everyone here apparently cares so much about the project that a discussion like this can easily escalate. Just stay kind to each other please. |
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@czuzu |
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I do agree with Benjamin for the most part.
This isn't quite right. Grant has the ability to work on his version of Manim fulltime, whereas us developers can only do it whenever we have free time. As a result, we simply don't have the same manpower - which is why things like better Additionally, Grant has different priorities than us - an obvious example is if he wants to switch from OpenGL to, say, Vulkan, he can just rewrite everything without any backwards compatibility concerns. However, backwards compatibility and preventing regressions is a huge thing in ManimCE. This is a more fundamental problem, as it means our architecture itself has to change in order to bring in other cool things Grant has on his fork. None of these have any relationship to ego, or a disdain towards working together (as evidenced again by Grant linking to our project in his video about Manim). It's more about a lack of manpower and different priorities. |
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How about something along these lines: "Manim Community Edition is forked from Manim, a tool originally created and open-sourced by Grant Sanderson, also creator of the 3Blue1Brown educational math videos. While Grant Sanderson’s repository (Manim) continues to be maintained separately by him, he is not among the maintainers of ManimCE. We recommend this version for its continued development, improved features, enhanced documentation, and more active community-driven maintenance. If you would like to study how Grant makes his videos, head over to his repository (link)." This gets rid of those "indebted" and "heavily based" terms (parts of the reason I subsequently mentioned maybe the suggested rephrasing was a bit too much) while still acknowledging clearly that he's the original author and differentiating between Manim<->ManimCE. And with this I wish you all a Merry Christmas, no crusades this time of year (or ever) 🎄 P.S. glad to know you guys are still in contact |
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That sounds good to me!
Yup, we still exist! For me personally, I'm busy with school, so I haven't been as active as I would've liked to be, but I still pop around every now and again to do some dev work (goes back to my previous point about manpower lol) |
Yes, this is very well written. |
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Pushed updated readme as well as potential addition to landing page. Let me know if you think the landing page addition needs relocation/rephrasing. |
Overview: What does this pull request change?
The current repository description contains a phrase that sounds dismissive of Grant Sanderson’s involvement in what concerns the Manim tool. I'm not trying to downplay the community's role, instead I find it important to give proper credit to the original author while also acknowledging community improvements over his original work. The line "not associated with Grant Sanderson or 3Blue1Brown in any way" downplays his role as the original creator and key contributor to the tool. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one feeling like that when reading that phrase, especially people that have watched and enjoyed his videos and know he is also the original author of the tool.
The CE home-page documentation here: https://docs.manim.community/en/stable/ also omits mentioning anything about him or his YouTube channel, which is unfair.
Motivation and Explanation: Why and how do your changes improve the library?
Proper credit to the original author.
Further Information and Comments
Please also update the home-page documentation: https://docs.manim.community/en/stable/
Reviewer Checklist