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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

#31

Post by Otek »

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…

He should credit author at least. That would be more with the spirit of OpenSource. Not using licences as a defence that "it's legally okay". It is, many things are legally okay, but still a shitty thing to do.

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

#32

Post by leppr »

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 ?

You only need to read the linked Twitter thread to get a couple examples.

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

#33

Post by andix »

rasz wrote: post #24
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.

This was missed in the first place, and was a violation of the license. But this was quickly fixed.

I don’t want to defend the „thief“ ai, but I think the original author is being a bit too dramatic. If you don’t like people „stealing“ your code, chose a more permissive license. But then also less people will use it.

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

#34

Post by andix »

listless wrote: post #30
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.

Exactly.

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

#35

Post by hayksaakian »

AI's response on GitHub:

"@jorgebucaran sorry for PostCSS/Browserslist migration from colorette. I understand your feeling (but it was an only move in case of colorette 2.x API changes and following API breaking change in patch release).

If you want to send another PR and replace chalk to colorette, I am OK with it. Babel’s users will be happy in both scenarios, since all colorette and nanocolors are both much smaller than chalk.

rebranded it as nanocolors

It is not true. Nano Colors was influenced by colorette API and internal design and I mentioned it in top section of Nano Colors docs. However, it is not rebranding:

I mix ideas not only from colorette but also from kleur, another great color formatting library. colorette and nanocolors has very different results in benchmark showing difference in internal implementation. If you compare kleur, nanocolors, and colorette you will see many similarities (because it is open source, and they share ideas between each other), but also many differences: In color detection. Nano Colors uses process.argv to be compatible with Chalk. In color’s functions. Nano Colors do not generate RegExp on every call for performance reasons. It also doesn’t have init/raw separation. This is not in the true spirit of open source.

Forks and idea sharing are also an important part of open-source if they are coming with respect to authors of origin ideas and mentioning them.

You are mentioned not only in docs (colorette mentioning text in Nano Colors docs was even approved by you) but also in LICENSE.

Before colorette 2.x API changes, I promote your project to other projects because I tried to find chalk alternative. I sent you PRs. I used your library in all my projects for a year.

We all stand on the shoulders of giants. We both used Chalk color detection algorithm as reference. We both using other source code to find the best optimizations.

If you do not like that your tools is also used as an inspiration (with mentioning you), feel free to replace this PR with PR of replacing chalk to colorette."

https://github.com/babel/babel/pull/13783#issuecomment-92710...

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

#36

Post by woodruffw »

leppr wrote: post #32
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 ?

You only need to read the linked Twitter thread to get a couple examples.

I read the thread, and it sounds like these libraries end up in what I think of (from other ecosystems) as “core” tooling: package managers, linters, &c. I definitely wasn’t expecting that: most of the other ecosystems I’ve interacted with have had a “vendor or reimplement” mentality when it comes to dependencies in common tooling.

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

#37

Post by Otek »

I wish the legal arguments (the fact that the original project was under the MIT license - that's right, the original author has no rights to draw consequences from this rip-off) didn't blind everyone to the fact that "ai" behaved not ok. Not in the spirit of OpenSource. If he encountered problems with the library, why didn't he want to contact the author first and suggest changes to the original project? Why didn't he write that the project is a fork? Why is he now pushing his library into projects that use colorette? Seems like an unclean pursuit of some imaginary power, instead of a desire to develop free software.

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

#38

Post by ctvo »

I'm losing my mind with people who keep replying with "That's open source baby! Don't make it open source if you don't like!"

The problem with this behavior is as follows:

- The MIT license requires attribution of the original work. The author contacted the person who forked this privately [1]. It wasn't done until the Twitter thread.

- Questionably the fork was renamed and didn't include git history to make the first point even worse. Git history was only rebased in after the Twitter thread [2].

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

2 - https://github.com/ai/nanocolors/commits/main?after=566a49b0...

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

#39

Post by detaro »

gopiandcode wrote: post #16
svalorzen wrote: post #5

Every time there is a post like this I go check the license of the original project. Invariably, it is MIT. I think this is probably indicative of something, although I couldn't say what.

I think it's likely indicative of the fact that the JS ecosystem doesn't really understand the meaning of open source (or the distinction between "open source" and free/libre software). The author's comments are quite enlightening of their incomplete understanding of the licenses they use: > nanocolors implementation and API are the same as > Colorette. You essentially pirated my work. After using a license that expl…

What exactly would be different here if the project was under GPL?

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

#40

Post by judofyr »

What is even going on here? https://github.com/jorgebucaran/colorette/issues/78. They're arguing about who should have attribution for adding a single "!s &&" to improve performance? What happened with the world where open-source was about creating cool projects together, not about who has the most stars on GitHub?

To be honest, this is the general feeling I get from the JavaScript community: Instead of working together to improve existing projects it's all about launching new alternative packages and get everyone to switch to your new fancy project. This causes a never ending churn where we jump between (incompatible) libraries with very little actual improvements.

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