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

free/libre does not equate to unlicensed.

Fork has violated the license of original by stripping the attribution and history.

The JS Open Source Community is filled with people grifting things like this. Quite notably, there's a linter called JS Standard Style, which actually has nothing to do with JS Standards.

It's marketed as if it was a standard, the fact that it isn't is tucked away in the readme, and also -- the entire project is just a wrapper around someones .eslintrc file, yet barely any credit is given to the ESLint devs who do all the work.

Go ahead and read the readme here, https://github.com/standard/standard. Could you genuinely tell this wasn't really a JS Standard at a glance? Could you tell this was just a config file for someone elses work? None of the donations go upstream to eslint by the way.

Hell, the actual config file is hidden inside a sub repo:

https://github.com/standard/eslint-config-standard

which has the audacity to claim

> This module is for advanced users. You probably want to use standard instead :)

It's a config file for someone elses program! Why does this library go through so much effort to hide that it's just someones config file? Why on earth is it called JS Standard Style?

The whole community is filled with slimy nonsense like this.

EDIT: also, this was the project that displayed ads in a million terminals on installs[1]. It's 100% clear to me that this package is misleadingly marketed for personal gain.

[1]: https://github.com/standard/standard/issues/1381

> Versions of software can have different licenses, and the license for each version is the license that the repo was under when that version was committed.

Not particularly wrong, just adding: There can even be additional licensing terms that aren't documented in the git history so they wouldn't be visible there.

And there is another sticky detail:

So if the original copy would have violated any of the licensing terms of the revision/release being copied (e.g. by removing copyright/authoring information), any more of these copies may become tainted if that resulted in a broken license chain. At this stage it is already regardless which licensing is announced in the new repository (and at which commit).

This poses some problems on very public systems like Github as it may not be directly visible any longer.

One way to deal with it is to block the violating user on Github. It's not perfect but can help with bookkeeping.

And in general you normally should just do Github forks to file pull requests, not to actually fork projects. Not saying that you can't - you can perfectly - but more on the level of day to day operations. For a full fork, you should have actual reasons. Otherwise its ruining the benefits of copying code.

This is JavaScript package-culture at work.

Many packages attempt to be those “as seen on Tv” gadgets which fix weirdly specific issues in a functionally-fixed way. Single-function goods are frequently given cutesy branding names in hopes of making their way into your home/package.json. Now we even have the product-level copycats.

Computer code is not an appliance, and no one cares how many people play with your little gadget.