Hello organisers,
Several participants have built on code another participant released publicly in this forum under the MIT licence (topic 18218), as its author intended. Rules §6 lists, among the pre-payment code review checks, that “the submitted code is the Participant’s own work (or appropriately attributed third-party code) and is not derived from another Participant’s submission”, and §4 says “Submissions authored substantially by other Participant(s), including but not limited to plagiarized submissions, will be considered a violation of this rule.”
- Is a Solution that builds on publicly released, MIT-licensed code by another participant (reimplemented or extended, with some of its published numeric constants reused) eligible for the score prizes under §4 and §6, provided it is attributed?
- If yes, is the MIT copyright and permission notice in the shipped source files, plus disclosure in the write-up, sufficient attribution?
A clear answer would help everyone choose their designated submissions. Thank you.
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We acknowledge the source of the confusion.
Here is how we read Sections 4, 5.7 and 6 from the Rules together.
1. Score-based prizes: You may use another participant’s public code as a base, as long as its licence permits it, you credit it clearly, conform to all requirements the said license has and add substantial changes of your own. Reusing the published constants that are part of that method is fine; they are part of what you are crediting. The test is whether your own work, not the reference code, earns the rank or prize. If the result is the public estimator with minor changes, we may rule it out of prize considerations or official leaderboard positions. The Organizers make that call at their sole discretion during the final review before any prizes are awarded.
2. Algorithmic-contribution prize: The same holds. Your write-up should clearly describe the reference method apart from your own and assess your contribution on its own merits. We will judge only the algorithmic contribution / analysis that is yours.
3. Attribution: Keeping the original MIT copyright and permission notice in the source files you ship, together with disclosure in your write-up of what you started from and what you changed, is sufficient. Note that different licenses might have different requirements. Please err on the side of stating clearly which parts are yours and which are the original author’s.
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