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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

#121

Post by gotoeleven »

chakkepolja wrote: post #103
colejohnson66 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Riddled with insecurity yet somehow lacking humility.

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

#122

Post by todd3834 »

otrahuevada wrote: post #115

What I find absolutely baffling about all this is that it could have been avoided by adding a throwaway line about how this library is a fork of the other one with performance in mind. A lot of drama can often be avoided if people just communicate better.

The way that git history was removed makes me wonder if they preferred to claim as their own original work. Unless erasing the history was done by accident.

This doesn’t feel like a communication issue as much as an ethical question.

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

#123

Post by NullPrefix »

thrower123 wrote: post #79
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

>107 different point-releases of lowdash

Would totally believe that lowdash is a lodash fork.

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

#124

Post by jeppester »

I don't think this behaviour is acceptable.

People should be encouraged to open source their code if it's useful for the community. They should not be worried that some big gun take it and promote it as its own.

I wonder how the community can best prevent this behaviour?

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

#125

Post by tessierashpool »

lordlic wrote: post #110
dralley wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That doesn't conflict with anything they said.

it doesn't conflict with the overall sense of what they said.

but it does conflict with this particular remark:

"the original author has no rights to draw consequences from this rip-off"

since the license requires attribution, this is false.

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

#126

Post by awestroke »

Isn't Jorge Bucaran the guy who contributed code to Oh My Fish and then tried to DMCA it for copyright violation (for the code that he had contributed) in order to get more traffic to his competitor project Fisherman? I'd not trust anything this guy says

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

#127

Post by ta988 »

tomxor wrote: post #102
ctvo wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

I thought it was a joke your is-odd comment. But no it is at version 3.0.1 and has 2.1 million downloads a month[0]... And it has a dependency to is-number. With the performance of today's tree shaking systems I wonder why there is not a simple math lib.

[0] https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-odd

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

#128

Post by ta988 »

kitsune_ wrote: post #104
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.

You are right I keep hearing in interviews, videos and blogs people talking about how many stars, please star me etc

There is something of a insane competition going on at various levels, people judging languages by their rank on various sources. Saying a specific language is "winning the race". We all know since the 70s that no language is winning ever. Calm down, code in what you like and people around you can use and understand. Create a new language, have fun... Things in life are not always a competition, you can relax.

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

#129

Post by tomxor »

ta988 wrote: post #127
tomxor wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

I thought it was a joke your is-odd comment. But no it is at version 3.0.1 and has 2.1 million downloads a month[0]... And it has a dependency to is-number. With the performance of today's tree shaking systems I wonder why there is not a simple math lib. [0] https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-odd

It's pretty crazy. For whatever reason there is a substantial culture around NPM usage of preferring to depend on lots of trivial packages, over writing simple inline equivalents. And it's recursive, which can mean depending on what seems to be a modest but useful package at the top of that hierarchy ends up pulling down 10k packages.

I think this makes it easier to acquire an inflated sense of importance when an authors package reaches popularity - most of the small packages have some value and aren't as ridiculously worthless as "is-odd"; yet they also don't embody anything particularly unique or difficult to replicate.

> I wonder why there is not a simple math lib.

There are some non-standard but comprehensive math libraries such as MathJS. Although I don't think "is-odd" could be attributed to an absence of standard math libraries.

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

#130

Post by syockit »

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.

Just a reminder: MIT license ≠ public domain.
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