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A notable JavaScript developer shamelessly copied one of my most downloaded nod

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Re: A notable JavaScript developer shamelessly copied one of my most downloaded nod

#21

Post by andix »

This seems to be a completely normal fork. This is not the first time that happens to open source software, and is an important part of the open source ecosystem. Off course forks are not a nice thing for the original authors, but a lot of good things happened because of forks. Libreoffice, Xorg, and many more.

The original package was MIT licensed, so this is totally legal and okay to do so

If there is a good reason for this fork, is another question. But if the forked library is now getting more traction than the original one, it is maybe doing something better.

PS: the fork is also MIT licensed, so the original author can totally backport the improvements into his original project.

Re: A notable JavaScript developer shamelessly copied one of my most downloaded nod

#22

Post by moreira »

This is the part I dislike about these super permissive licenses. Attribution is required, but a couple lines in some random file do you a fat lot of good if someone forks your project, rebrands, and essentially builds on top of your hard work.

It's the ugly side of open source. The community runs on the assumption that we're all on the same side and we wouldn't stab each other in the back like that, but it happens, and when it does, it stings, and a couple lines in some README file don't make up for it.

Is there a license that permits usage as a package, allows people to contribute, but prohibits forking? I guess, similar to what happened with ElasticSearch and others, right?

Re: A notable JavaScript developer shamelessly copied one of my most downloaded nod

#23

Post by ctvo »

tomxor wrote: post #17

It's easily agreeable that attribution should have been given before publishing, but the level of hysteria in this post is excessive. The author of the fork immediately complied and had likely just made a mistake in a hastily published fork. I suspect the original author was more frustrated with the fork existing.

The original author mentioned reaching out privately.

https://twitter.com/DerianAndre/status/1441851684095811585

As a "prolific and known" open source personality you'd think they'd be more careful? Their attitude since then has left a lot to be desired.

Re: A notable JavaScript developer shamelessly copied one of my most downloaded nod

#24

Post by rasz »

andix wrote: post #21

This seems to be a completely normal fork. This is not the first time that happens to open source software, and is an important part of the open source ecosystem. Off course forks are not a nice thing for the original authors, but a lot of good things happened because of forks. Libreoffice, Xorg, and many more. The original package was MIT licensed, so this is totally legal and okay to do so If there is a good reason…

Completely normal fork starts by admitting its a Fork in the first place.

Re: A notable JavaScript developer shamelessly copied one of my most downloaded nod

#25

Post by oolonthegreat »

it's also worth pointing out the author of nanocolors https://github.com/ai has multiple PRs in the last few days asking libraries to replace chalk/colorette with his nanocolors. smells bad to me but maybe that's how the whole thing works.

Re: A notable JavaScript developer shamelessly copied one of my most downloaded nod

#26

Post by colejohnson66 »

woodruffw wrote: post #20

This is going to sound like a dumb question and is certainly going to be an unrelated tangent, but: why in the world does the Node ecosystem have half a dozen competing terminal colorization libraries? Is that much CLI tooling really being written in JavaScript? I spend virtually my entire workday in a terminal, and I’ve never once needed a CLI tool written in JS. Where is all this code going ?

I’d wager a guess that bootcamps teaching JS producing lots of people. Eventually, some will want to recreate something from scratch. A law of large numbers thing. I could be wrong though.

As for where it’s going, Node based CLI programs. For example, `yarn upgrade-interactive` uses it (a chalk-like module)

Re: A notable JavaScript developer shamelessly copied one of my most downloaded nod

#28

Post by [deleted] »

woodruffw wrote: post #20

This is going to sound like a dumb question and is certainly going to be an unrelated tangent, but: why in the world does the Node ecosystem have half a dozen competing terminal colorization libraries? Is that much CLI tooling really being written in JavaScript? I spend virtually my entire workday in a terminal, and I’ve never once needed a CLI tool written in JS. Where is all this code going ?

[deleted]

Re: A notable JavaScript developer shamelessly copied one of my most downloaded nod

#29

Post by ctvo »

moreira wrote: post #22

This is the part I dislike about these super permissive licenses. Attribution is required, but a couple lines in some random file do you a fat lot of good if someone forks your project, rebrands, and essentially builds on top of your hard work. It's the ugly side of open source. The community runs on the assumption that we're all on the same side and we wouldn't stab each other in the back like that, but it happens,…

> Attribution is required, but a couple lines in some random file do you a fat lot of good if someone forks your project, rebrands, and essentially builds on top of your ripped off hard work.

Creator of the original work understands their license, and is happy when this happens [1]. The problem is this minimal, low bar wasn't even met. It was a fork in all sense of the word with git history wiped, renamed, and attribution removed until it was brought up publicly.

1 - https://twitter.com/jorgebucaran/status/1441741173085786116

Re: A notable JavaScript developer shamelessly copied one of my most downloaded nod

#30

Post by listless »

andix wrote: post #21

This seems to be a completely normal fork. This is not the first time that happens to open source software, and is an important part of the open source ecosystem. Off course forks are not a nice thing for the original authors, but a lot of good things happened because of forks. Libreoffice, Xorg, and many more. The original package was MIT licensed, so this is totally legal and okay to do so If there is a good reason…

The other way to look at this is that this guy’s whole Twitter thread is not in the spirit of open source. It’s not about you. It’s about improving life for everyone by freely sharing code. If you want it to be about you, don’t pick MIT from that drop down.
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