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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

#81

Post by honzzz »

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…

>> there's a massive personal value to having a library used by large numbers of people.

I have no experience with this - would you kindly explain that value? I am guessing that it has something to do with personal brand (my library is popular => I am good at this, hire me) - am I on the right track? Is there more?

(edited grammar)

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

#82

Post by wobblyasp »

toastercat wrote: post #65

https://twitter.com/equinusocio/status/1441732243727192087?s... > You should think this "wow, the author of one of the most popular frontend tools of today just used my work as reference. It's an honor." By far my favorite and most ridiculous tweet I've seen in this thread.

That is by far one of the worst takes I've seen. Beyond the fact that he A) has no skin in the game, so why comment, he B) is assuming to know "how" someone should feel about anything.

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

#83

Post by Zerverus »

krono wrote: post #57
oolonthegreat wrote: post #25

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.

He does seem very aggressive in his attempts to get this into as many popular packages (and/or onto as many machines) as he can in the shortest amount of time. According to the original project's author, he even silently removed loads of edge case handlers until he was called out on it [0]. That seems to have been a really quick and dirty tactic to get his performance numbers up. My spidey senses are tingling too. [0…

Wouldnt be surprised if the package then gets sold to some shady people.

Desperate people do desperate things and this surely looks desperate.

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

#84

Post by PeterisP »

andix wrote: post #43
gopiandcode wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For libraries it is very difficult to chose a permissive license. Most companies have a whitelist for licenses for libraries they are allowed to use. And for a good reason. This is mostly MIT, BSD and Apache. If you use a gpl licensed library in your project, it essentially becomes gpl licensed too. If you ever want to sell your software, this is probably a big no-no. It will become quite challenging, and could end u…

What about LGPL which is quite explicitly designed for libraries?

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

#85

Post by lelandfe »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #71
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.

You can see the original commit history in forks of nanocolor that occurred before Andrey Sitnik rebased:

* https://github.com/antonk52/nanocolors/commits/main

* https://github.com/corysimmons/nanocolors/commits/main?after...

You can, indeed, see that they lack all of the original repo's commits.

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

#86

Post by zarzavat »

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 ?

It's because it's something that can be easily influential. At some point every sufficiently large CLI tool needs a terminal color library, and if you can make yours 1% better than anything else, then you can make a library that touches a lot of projects, which is great for your resume and improves your job prospects (at least that's what they hope).

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

#87

Post by mmastrac »

honzzz wrote: post #81
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…

>> there's a massive personal value to having a library used by large numbers of people. I have no experience with this - would you kindly explain that value? I am guessing that it has something to do with personal brand (my library is popular => I am good at this, hire me) - am I on the right track? Is there more? (edited grammar)

That's exactly it. As someone else in this comment section described, there's "clout" from being the maintainer of a popular library and this particular action could be seen as "clout-chasing".

It's terrible that clout is such a thing in open-source, but there are complex incentive issues that led to this point.

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

#88

Post by mmastrac »

gcr wrote: post #80
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.

I clarified the comment a bit -- I considered that attribution-stripping, but I think you're right that it's more than just that.

Tangentially: it's somewhat interesting that we don't consider the source code history in our OSS licenses...

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

#89

Post by QuadmasterXLII »

linkdd wrote: post #12
caslon wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's literally three lines of actual content. It would not take you long to read it. The MIT License (MIT) Copyright © 2021 Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, an…

No need to be condescending with phrasing like "It would not take you long to read it".

it wasn’t necessary, but as a bystander I enjoyed it :)

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

#90

Post by ctvo »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #71
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.

In addition to what others have pointed out:

https://twitter.com/jorgebucaran/status/1441886210998239238

The commits in nanocolor's git history also don't include Jorge's verified signature, which would come with the fork.

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