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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

#71

Post by YetAnotherNick »

ctvo wrote: post #38

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 firs…

> Git history was only rebased in after the Twitter thread [2].

Any source to this? Your referenced link does not support your hypothesis.

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

#72

Post by BiteCode_dev »

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 ?

Because a lot of the JS community comes from the design world, and they care about colors more than other communities.

In Python, the experience has been the opposite. We had to wait until recently to have once very good decent terminal coloring lib: rich.

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

#73

Post by d3nj4l »

I keep thinking about this event and it seems like a fractal of bizarre phenomena. The act of stripping git history and attribution while forking is itself malicious, but then aggressively creating pull requests across major projects to use the new version and rack up your download count (???), then picking petty fights with the creator of the original over attribution (????), and the fanbase (?????) of the forker dogpiling the original creator (??????) is... what? I struggle to attribute these to normal, healthy motivations. Something is very, very wrong with the JS Open Source community if naked clout chasing like this is not only tolerated but also rewarded with fans!

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

#74

Post by penjelly »

reading through the threads it does appear both individuals are vying for some semblance of "fame", that the forker forked without git history and that the change was small enough to be made in a pr and merged. I think most of the contention here is that the forker ended up switching over babels (a build tool for js) codependency over to the new fork and without git history.

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

#75

Post by jagged-chisel »

dochtman wrote: post #45
ctvo wrote: post #38

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 firs…

IIUC lack of attribution in this case is enough to invoke GitHub's DMCA process against the violating repo.

Any violation of the license. Lack of attribution is a violation of the license.

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

#76

Post by wizzwizz4 »

pabs3 wrote: post #68
thrower123 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Javascript is the opposite of a batteries-included language, so there is and has been an enormous amount of wasted effort duplicating functionality that should have been in a standard library.

Are there any movements towards creating a standard library for JavaScript (or at least server-side JS)?

There are many, many, many such movements. Which somewhat defeats the point, really.

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

#77

Post by d3nj4l »

thrower123 wrote: post #60
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.

Everything in the npm ecosystem pretty much has to be MIT, or none of it would work. You could poison most of the web dev ecosystem by changing the license on a handful of packages to GPL...

The GPL wouldn't affect server-side JS (you'd need the AGPL for that), but client-side JS would have to be released under the GPL in un-minified form.

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

#78

Post by exdsq »

Aside from who’s right and who’s wrong, although I do agree with this is an unattributed fork, the idea that JS OSS devs are incentivized to do this to increase their downloads number is absurd. Maybe we need to replace that with a star system including both security vulnerabilities and downloads that is less dopamine-inducing than a moving number.

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

#79

Post by thrower123 »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #76
pabs3 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any movements towards creating a standard library for JavaScript (or at least server-side JS)?

There are many, many, many such movements. Which somewhat defeats the point, really.

This is why I have 107 different point-releases of lowdash and jquery in my node_modules folder

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

#80

Post by gcr »

mmastrac wrote: post #52

I think the forker here just crossed one of those invisible lines by a collection of actions that smell bad when seen as a whole. He forked, stripped attribution and history [+] (license violation, but on its own probably just rises to the level of minor dickishness and is often a misunderstanding) He started advertising his fork to replace the originally forked repo (a bit rude). If the original library was unmainta…

You're forgetting the fact that he also went out of his way to strip the git history at first.
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