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I've Just Liberated My Modules

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Re: I've Just Liberated My Modules

#281

Post by yazaddaruvala »

camwest wrote: post #232
shruubi wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I can appreciate the predicament this presents, do you not feel like you are going against the wishes of the original author by essentially overtaking him and publishing his code against his will?

Well the code was open sourced. Isn't that sort of the point of open source?

Lol, so if I'm understanding you correctly:

Someone was nice enough to write some software, that is clearly indispensable. They were nice enough to not charge money for it. They were nice enough to support it, again free of cost. They were also nice enough to open source it, such that if it ever became more convenient for you to fork/change/do whatever you want with, that you would be able to.

And when that same person is being bullied (regardless of legalities) and instead of building them up, helping them fight against their bullies, you decided to shrug your shoulders, go against their wishes, exploit the fact that its open source, and when asked if you felt bad about it, responded: (paraphrased) "Well... technically..."

On the one hand: Really? You don't even feel bad about it? Do you not see that it is machiavellian? You don't even care enough to use the age old "better of two evils"/"end justifies the means"/etc arguments? Bold.

On the other hand: Kudos! I don't think I would be able to pull it off like you do.

Re: I've Just Liberated My Modules

#282

Post by wolfgke »

hyperpape wrote: post #267
wolfgke wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My point is mostly that often, when it comes to law, lay-people talk about what they _wish_ the law was, rather than what the law actually is. That is why the law should be formalized such that correctness proofs for argumentations can be given and in doubt even be checked independently by a computer. Exactly because of the possibility of different opinions and wishes, coming up with such a high standard should be…

My background is in 20th century Anglo-American philosophy, which spent a great deal of time seeing how far one can push formalization or quasi-formalization of interesting concepts. I wish I had a good capsule version of why I think this won't work, but it won't. Formalization is a tool, and an important one, and there probably are areas where a more formal approach to law could pay off. However, attempting to remov…

I just read about the Gettier problem: In my opinion one should better model knowledge as some kind of estimators for probabilities and being justified on some statistical criterion. This should in my opinion avoid the whole Gettier problem (but perhaps introduce some completely different ones?).

Re: I've Just Liberated My Modules

#283

Post by perennate »

krapp wrote: post #228
shruubi wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I can appreciate the predicament this presents, do you not feel like you are going against the wishes of the original author by essentially overtaking him and publishing his code against his will?

The author's explicit wishes, in no uncertain terms, are that anyone can "do what the fuck they want to with it" [0][1]. I think when he did this, he gave up (willingly, and with a bit of profanity) the right to have any say at all about whether, how or by whom it was published. [0] http://www.wtfpl.net/ [1] https://github.com/azer/left-pad/blob/master/package.json#L2...

The author also said "if you volunteer to take ownership of any module in my Github, I’ll happily transfer the ownership" in the blog post.

Re: I've Just Liberated My Modules

#284

Post by ubernostrum »

joshmanders wrote: post #45
larkinrichards wrote: post #31

I applaud this action and while I'd like to point the finger at NPM, there's no real other method to fix historical package versions that depend on this. It is worth pointing to the silly state of NPM packages: Who decided that an external dependency was necessary for a module that is 17 lines of code? module.exports = leftpad; function leftpad (str, len, ch) { str = String(str); var i = -1; if (!ch && ch !== 0) ch =…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy

In this case the npm ecosystem is providing more of a surrogate standard library. Imagine if there were no libc, for example, and so people had to reimplement all those functions; would you really want one package per function because of how "Unix philosophy" it would be?

This is where the JavaScript ecosystem is right now -- JS doesn't have the kind of robust standard library other languages take for granted, so you end up with a lot of these things that look like they should be stdlib functions, but are instead third-party packages the entire world has to depend on for a usable programming environment.

Re: I've Just Liberated My Modules

#285

Post by _puk »

pygy_ wrote: post #171
_puk wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably, if the original author had changed the licence and pushed to npm prior to change of ownership then npm wouldn't have been able to do this? Sounds like we could start seeing npm specific releases with different licences to the github repo (or npm specific branches with different licencing) Obviously npm could re-publish the non npm specific code, but that would be more manual than a simple revert of an unp…

Even if Azer had relicensed the code, NPM had a copy of the code released under the original one, which can't be revoked.

Yeah, I appreciate that, but if this becomes a general concern that npm can grant ownership to whoever it deems acceptable (even to the point of republishing existing versions), then could we start seeing e.g. WTFPL with npm exceptions style licence fragmentation.

The source could still be readily available to anyone to republish as they see fit, but only as a different name / version.

Not condoning it, just thinking that the original author surely has the right to do this if they plan ahead (judging by the npm backlash that has been building over a single entity holding all the keys some may be starting to think this way).

Re: I've Just Liberated My Modules

#286

Post by tapsboy »

jlarocco wrote: post #170

Assuming it's kik.com that complained, the complaint to take down the kik NPM module seems legitimate. They've clearly been around a lot longer, are known by more people, and are in an overlapping market. It seems like a lot of people would expect a kik module in NPM to be related to the company in some way, and it wasn't.

kik module could have been called kik-messenger

Else even http://www.kik.de/ could claims kik for an API to it's merchandise

Re: I've Just Liberated My Modules

#287

Post by overgard »

callmevlad wrote: post #43

The fact that this is possible with NPM seems really dangerous. The author unpublished (erm, "liberated") over 250 NPM modules, making those global names (e.g. "map", "alert", "iframe", "subscription", etc) available for anyone to register and replace with any code they wish. Since these libs are now baked into various package.json configuration files (some with 10s of thousands of installs per month, "left-pad" with…

Do they seriously not use any sort of public key cryptography to sign packages? Frankly, for a project that's been around as long as NPM, that's downright irresponsible if that's the case. That's like package management 101.

Re: I've Just Liberated My Modules

#288

Post by fiatjaf »

Why isn't GitHub the source of all node packages? npm supports it very nicely.

I mean: why don't people write `npm install user/repo --save` instead of `npm install package --save` every time already?

Re: I've Just Liberated My Modules

#289

Post by kofejnik »

aidos wrote: post #134
kasey_junk wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having no understanding of the broader js context I assumed the comment to mean "all library dependencies should be checked in, build tools should be defined & specified & able to fully recreate the build given they are installed". For the record this is a well known & frequently advocated for build pattern.

Fair enough, I guess I was just thinking of the issue I'd run into with trying to actually install anything in the first place. In the case of npm though, installation brings down a lot of files so it's not super efficient. I've installed 15 packages and have over 12,000 files (75MB) to show for it.

this is not a serious burden on git, plus they will rarely change

Re: I've Just Liberated My Modules

#290

Post by spinlock »

callmevlad wrote: post #43

The fact that this is possible with NPM seems really dangerous. The author unpublished (erm, "liberated") over 250 NPM modules, making those global names (e.g. "map", "alert", "iframe", "subscription", etc) available for anyone to register and replace with any code they wish. Since these libs are now baked into various package.json configuration files (some with 10s of thousands of installs per month, "left-pad" with…

You can use github and get namespacing under the author.

IMO, this could end npmjs of they don't fix the issue.

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