341–350 of 827 posts
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How do you know what they thought? It seems just as likely to me that they didn't see much merit in the complaint, but didn't think it was worth fighting since IP law is such a mess in the US that even clearly baseless complaints can drag on and become expensive.
Because npm stated it publicly on Twitter.
This is a surprisingly effective protest action. It got the attention of an incredible number of people very quickly, and the damage is mostly limited to wasting the time of a bunch of build cops. I don't have much of an opinion on his actual reasons for protesting, but I do think it was a pretty cool protest.
The "attention" he's going to get is people annoyed at him for breaking their shit carelessly over a petty dispute with a third party. I have some stuff at work that uses NPM, and I don't know if he broke it, but my thoughts right now are "fuck that guy" and "I would never use NPM again if I knew how catastrophically badly designed it is" and more broadly "if the JS community is this amateur and petty I'm writing my…
Then the protest was effective.
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a) from what I understand, his project was there first. b) NPM shouldn't have to fight it unless they are requested to, the trademark claim was ridiculous to begin with. Regardless of the claim, enforcing it would have taken years... I'm not saying NPM shouldn't have comply with the request and rename the package but definitely could/should have handled this better. c) the guy wrote: "NPM is no longer a place that I’…
> the trademark claim was ridiculous to begin with. npm's lawyers disagree with you, and they're lawyers. EDIT: cool HN, -2 for stating a fact. Sure, I don't disagree that this lawsuit is kind of silly, but npm's laywers don't think this suit is _frivolous_, which is what matters.
Which means if they say "it's very serious threat" and the code gets deleted everybody would think they are serious lawyers even if the claim looked ridiculous - because you see, lawyers said it's serious and who are you to argue?
On the other hand, if they ever say "it's ridiculous" and then they get sued, they could be fired or at least suffer damage to their reputation for not preventing it.
Thus, there is exactly zero incentive for the lawyers - at least ones acting purely according to near-term incentives - to ever take even a minimal risk and declare anything like that ridiculous. They have all incentives to always react as if it was 100% genuine infringement - because that costs very little and has no risk.
Some lawyers and companies are more civic-minded and reject some ridiculous requests and take risk because that's the right thing to do. But you can not require people to be heroes.
On the other hand, we are not lawyers, so we have all the incentives to proclaim how ridiculous the whole thing is.
Azer has contributed awesome modules to the community, but such a move _obviously_ messes with a bunch of people who previously didn't trust npm, but Azer. Npm works fine. There might be issues with it, but the reason builds are failing right now is that he decided to unpublish all of them - in a move that feels very kneejerky, despite him claiming that it's the opposite. If this had been actually in the interest of…
Didn't NPM break builds by completely swapping out the contents of a known module ? Obviously NPM should not be relied on, but this really makes the case. NPM will arbitrarily modify packages without notice -- this could be the unwinding of NPM.
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 =…
Having a multitude of small utilities like this is a great thing with many advantages. It may seem simple to write leftpad, but if 1000 projects that need it all write their own version, there will be at least 2000 more software bugs out there in the wild because of it. If you think that's rediculous, you're not being realistic about the huge disparity in skill levels of industry programmers as well as the considerab…
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy
Taking an idea to the logical extreme is an effective means of invalidating said idea. How many UNIX utilities are 17 silly lines long? A bit of code duplication would go a long way towards bringing sanity to JS land.
- Why you gave me a different coin today?
and the young man says:
- I got married and now I'm starting a family, I need more money so I can not give you as much anymore.
And the beggar cries out:
- People, look at this putz, he got married, and now I have to feed his family?!
I think the fact that we get so many awesome things for free is unbelievably lucky. I mean, not only we work in the one of the more generously paid jobs, we also get a lot of the tools we need for free! How cool is that? But some people think that if they are given those awesome things for free, they must deserve it and whoever gives them owes them forever. That's not the case. Yes, it is annoying to find somebody who contributed before does not want to do it anymore. It is mildly inconvenient and it can be improved. But let's not lose the perspective - the author does not owe us or npm continued support. It is sad he does not want to do it anymore, but that's what open source is about - people can take it over, and it happened within a single day. Such resilience is something to be proud of, not something to complain about.
One interesting thing to me, is that it is pretty clear that the kik lawyers pretty dramatically over enforced their trademark. For those who don't know, the purpose of trademarks is to prevent customer confusion; essentially we don't want people to be able to sell cheap knock-offs of someone else's thing without the general public being able to easily distinguish between them. In practical terms, trademarks are "sco…
That's not necessarily true if Kik were planning to open up some kind of API. Also, the way the law works in the US encourages corporations to overreach. If you don't try to protect your trademark from every possible angle, it can lead to your loss of it in a court battle. A lot of times, lawyers will send out letters without caring how the recipient responds -- they only need to have sent the letter at all to have c…
Surely opening up a new API doesn't give them retroactive rights to the name in that space.
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I honestly wouldn't have a problem with them removing that option, and only allowing packages to be removed by contacting support with a good reason. (Accidental private info disclosure, copyright violation, severe security bug, etc.) Even Rust's Cargo won't allow you to revoke secrets [1]. I think this is the correct policy. [1] http://doc.crates.io/crates-io.html#cargo-yank
Aside from secrets there is also sensitive data. If someone accidentally uploads some personal information, they need a way to remove it if, say, they receive a court order ordering them to remove it.