John Hemming, LibDem MP and thieving little Script Kiddie?

Blogging MP for West Bromwich – Tom Watson came up with this little gem today that I thought needed a bit more attention from the more technical angle. It relates to John Hemming, the LibDem MP for Yardley in Birmingham having used someone else’s code for his website. More specifically we’re looking at this. It’s John’s left hand sidebar menu and very nice it is too. For your delectation here’s the code for it and don’t worry there’s only a few bits of it that we need to examine, I won’t get too technical.

OK, it doesn’t look like anything particularly special but when compared to this bit of code written by this guy it does start to look strange.

Now we’re not looking at all the menu items as John’s obviously tailored them to his own needs but moreover we’re looking for one thing that is there and a few things that aren’t. The big giveaway is in the title of the script. They both identify it as ‘JSwitch Slide Menu’.

If we look further down on the original we find this, the license agreement:

“LICENSE:

YOU ARE GRANTED THE RIGHT TO USE THE SCRIPT

PERSONALLY OR COMMERCIALLY. THE AUTHOR, WEBSITE LINKS

AND LICENSE INFORMATION IN THE HEADER OF THE SCRIPT

MUST NOT BE MODIFIED OR REMOVED.”

Which relates to this:

“Author: Eric Simmons
Website: http://www.jswitch.com
Version: 2.1 04/2006″

That for some strange reason seems to be conspicuous by its absence from John Hemming’s script.

For the record, I’m an Open Sourcer, this website was built entirely though the use of Open Source code and software and I’ve acknowledged everything I’ve used. In the techie world openness and honesty is always the best policy and if someone else has toiled over a bit of code for hours and requests that you acknowledge the author or have a customary link back to them then that just good manners and techies with bad manners who thieve stuff and deliberately exclude the originator are considered the lowest of the low.

That’s not to say you don’t find some strange requests by authors at times. I remember once coming across one where the author requested that his code shouldn’t be used in anything that might in some way be offensive to God. Not knowing exactly what would be offensive to God I decided to steer clear of it, but that’s another story.

What it does show is that John Hemming has gone down considerably in my estimation (not that he could go much lower, he is a LibDem after all) and shown himself to be a disingenuous person happy to nick other people’s code but not acknowledge it.

Note: I’ve used the term Script Kiddie as although I know it is generally used in relation to software and not web based code and although some use the term Web Monkey I feel that Script Kiddie is a better description.

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