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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

#101

Post by egeozcan »

d3nj4l wrote: post #73

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 do…

I do like releasing everything I develop as FOSS, but we all agree that something like this can happen when we do, even though most of us (me included) find it at least distasteful.

Unfortunately this is what happens when any space gets super-competitive, then some people stop caring about spirits and anything else that's impossible to police in a meaningful way. JS is one of the, if not the, most popular programming language in use and it's incredibly accessible. It'd be (and I say this in the most polite and constructive way I could think of) silly to expect that stuff like this won't happen and that there won't be any group of people even cheering this kind of behavior.

We all seemingly live in bubbles, at some point we have to realize that we have the whole world in front of us in this crazy place called internet. Well, wasn't that the idea behind the "Eternal September"[0]? It'll not get better unless the whole world gets better.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

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

#102

Post by tomxor »

ctvo wrote: post #94
d3nj4l wrote: post #73

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 do…

The absolutely crazy thing is the person who caused this doesn't even think they did anything wrong: https://github.com/babel/babel/pull/13783#issuecomment-92724... And there are people supporting their position. I think because JS is such a large tent, there are folks not familiar with licenses and general norms in this space. I don't think it's something that being reasonable and pointing things out wouldn't fix. A…

> I think because JS is such a large tent, there are folks not familiar with licenses and general norms in this space.

It's worth pointing out that this is all about a bunch of packages that decorate strings with ANSI colour escape sequences... I'm not saying it's worthless, or that there is nothing wrong in principle - but it's a lot of noise over something easily replicable from scratch - something simple enough that you may even choose to not bother with a library, (i've always just used ANSI codes directly in JS command line tools, sometimes defined in a few constants and interpolated for readability).

So perhaps the reason why one author is so pissed at misattribution, and the other allegedly doesn't seem to care much about it, is explained by a large difference in perceived value of the code.

To make my point more potent, imagine it was the same debacle over one of the many infamous one line NPM packages like "is-odd" which currently has half a million downloads per day and ultimately consists of the code "return (n % 2) === 1;"... excluding all of the fluff, and even with some unnecessary parenthesis.

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

#103

Post by chakkepolja »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #26
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)

Combination of so much JS programmers being

    * Young

    * Hipster

    * From bootcamps without any other serious knowledge.

    * A culture of resume padding

    * A total lack of care about security, performance or reliability.

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

#104

Post by kitsune_ »

d3nj4l wrote: post #73

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 do…

GitHub / NPM / Twitter together with the conference scene seem to be leading to some form of insta-gramification of open source and programming in general it seems.

Edit: Maybe HN is to blame as well.

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

#105

Post by zwerdlds »

Otek wrote: post #31
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.

It's NOT legally OK. The license permits use of the copyrighted work with certain terms, attribution being one. That term was violated, just as when a big company takes a low level gpl driver and uses it without releasing the source. AI could have rightly been subject to a DMCA takedown, which is a legal action, for example.

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

#106

Post by notimrelakatos »

judofyr wrote: post #40

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 tog…

Behind the pretty facade there's a hyper competitive environment inside the JS community, sometimes with very low stakes. What's the incentive to fix fundamental issues if the metrics for success are stars and forks?

The best way to avoid their insanity is to use JS as a target language, pick some of their good tools and move on with life, working with safer languages.

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

#107

Post by agustif »

woodruffw wrote: post #46
sofixa wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's lots of CLI tools around JavaScript itself. And many third-party developer oriented services ( Firebase, Netlify, etc.) have their CLIs in JS as well.

Thanks for the context. I do very little work with SaaS services, so I’m extraordinarily ignorant of their CLIs!

If you ever are interested, there's some cool stuff in the area like oclif framework. (from heroku) for building nice CLI tools...

Very interesting mix of JS+CLI indeed

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

#108

Post by jraph »

mmastrac wrote: post #88
gcr wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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

I think it would be too restrictive. It might prevent you from working differently for no clear benefits. However, keeping the history is an easy way to track who contributed what so you probably should keep the history of projects with more than one contributors or you lose precise attribution in practice (apart for the other obvious reasons to keep the history).

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

#109

Post by chenmike »

thrower123 wrote: post #61
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 ?

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.

We’re talking about a terminal colorization function though. Fragmentation of packages aside, are there any other languages that have terminal text colorization built into the standard library?

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

#110

Post by lordlic »

dralley wrote: post #91
Otek wrote: post #37

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…

The MIT license still requires attribution, so no this isn't ok.

That doesn't conflict with anything they said.
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