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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

#221

Post by pritambaral »

hjek wrote: post #147
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 act of stripping git history and attribution while forking is itself malicious, Well, okay, the forking could have been more politely, but author is a bit fast to pull the pirate card. It's a free/libre fork of a free/libre project after all. > nanocolors implementation and API are the same as Colorette. You essentially pirated my work.[0] [0]: https://twitter.com/jorgebucaran/status/1441728642711572486

free/libre != Do what you want

Copying and redistributing software without a license IS the definition of software piracy.

The current version appears to be MIT licensed. It is safe to assume that the fork was made under the same license. Given this assumption, and given that the MIT license requires copyright information to be preserved, stripping attribution is a license violation.

The claim of piracy is valid.

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

#222

Post by ergocoder »

detaro wrote: post #201
ergocoder wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Colorette clearly copies that line from nanocolors, no? And he incorporated it into his benchmark to show that colorette is as fast as nanocolor. It sounds like an important optimization. If this wasn't copied, colorette would have been objectively worse than nanocolor.

> Why? Colorette clearly copies that line from nanocolors, no? And he copied the entire source code earlier and didn't mind hiding who wrote that? But now suddenly a tiny fix (which might be tiny and obvious enough to not even meet any copyright standard, although that's always vague and difficult) is worthy of demanding attribution for? That's really not the moment to go nitpicking the other guy. (Would a mention in…

> And he copied the entire source code earlier and didn't mind hiding who wrote that?

I agree with you here, but aren't we talking about something else?

> But now suddenly a tiny fix

It's an impactful fix. Now colorette can claim that there's no performance difference between colorette and nanocolors.

If this fix wasn't there, colorette would be objectively slower than nanocolors.

If I am the user, I will choose the one that is faster, so this is an important improvement.

> is worthy of demanding attribution for?

Yes. Are you against both attributing each other accurately?

Nanocolors currently attributes colorette for the whole fork (albeit after being called out).

Colorette still refuses to attribute nanocolors specifically for this important performance improvement, even after being called out.

> That's really not the moment to go nitpicking the other guy.

Why not? The current topic is about improper attribution.

It's fair to look at improper attribution on both sides, not just one side.

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

#223

Post by bsagdiyev »

iskin wrote: post #210
exdsq wrote: post #78

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.

Why it is a unattributed fork if Colorette is mentioned in docs, COPYRIGHT and origin commits are in history?

You should mention your conflict of interest as the nanocolors “developer”.

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

#224

Post by woodruffw »

torstenvl wrote: post #217
andrewflnr wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's downvoted because it's a semantic nitpick based on a misunderstanding; it doesn't have enough meaning to contain a "factual error".

If it's just a misunderstanding, why try to punish him with the karma hit? That's just bullying, imho.

I don’t think this particular comment deserves any downvotes (and I didn’t downvote either it or its parent), but remarking on a comment’s vote status on HN is a general faux pas.

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

#225

Post by torstenvl »

woodruffw wrote: post #224
torstenvl wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's just a misunderstanding, why try to punish him with the karma hit? That's just bullying, imho.

I don’t think this particular comment deserves any downvotes (and I didn’t downvote either it or its parent), but remarking on a comment’s vote status on HN is a general faux pas.

I am aware that complaining about your own downvotes is against the site rules. That is not what's going on here.

Instead, danw1979 was asking for someone to explain why a reasonable comment was getting downvoted into oblivion. Neither danw1979 nor lmilcin did anything to deserve the random dogpile they received.

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

#226

Post by woodruffw »

datenarsch wrote: post #182
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 think it's because they try to impress their non-technical friends with flashy colourful and matrix-like terminal windows and come off as hackers when in reality most of them don't even know what a stack overflow is.

This kind of programming elitism is a general bummer: what good does it do to gatekeep “hacker” in this way?

Even the context is absurd: we’re on a website that calls itself “Hacker News” but caters chiefly to the relatively narrow and un-hacker-like interests of a handful of overcapitalized investors.

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

#227

Post by n_e »

ergocoder wrote: post #188
arduinomancer wrote: post #143

Good comment by one of the Chalk maintainers https://github.com/babel/babel/pull/13783#issuecomment-92731...

I don't think the main message from chalk maintainers is good. Chalk maintainers basically discard the performance improvement as micro-benchmarking (i.e. "doesn't matter in the real world"). Chalk maintainers also say tree shaking doesn't matter in the real world. Why do they minimize these 2 improvements? If 2 libraries are equivalent, I'd go with the ones with extra improvements. Chalk maintainers also mentioned t…

> Chalk maintainers basically discard the performance improvement as micro-benchmarking (i.e. "doesn't matter in the real world"). Chalk maintainers also say tree shaking doesn't matter in the real world.

Chalk’s purpose is to color things printed to the terminal. Unless it’s performance is atrocious, which I doubt, it doesn’t matter unless a ridiculous amount of data is printed.

> Chalk maintainers also say tree shaking doesn't matter in the real world

No, they say it doesn’t matter for chalk’s use case. Which is command-line tools that are almost never tree-shaken.

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

#228

Post by robocat »

hitekker wrote: post #212
iskin wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the mantion of colorette is on top of Nano Colors docs with clear list of why fork was created and the changes https://github.com/ai/nanocolors#nano-colors

As others have pointed out, Andrey Sitnik only added the mention after the twitter thread blew up.

iskin is ai/Andrey Sitnik - he hasn’t made it obvious here, but see other comments in this thread.

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

#229

Post by et-al »

zkldi wrote: post #149
ta988 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

For what it's worth, this is also all the work of one person who spammed NPM with micropackages to boost his download counts. This meme attacking `npm` for nonsense like `is-odd` is quite literally the result of one person resume boosting. For every one thing, he broke it down into as many possible packages as possible, and all of his packages depend on 20 more of his packages. It's like a fractal of resume boosting.…

Wow, this person's Github about says it all.

> Several years ago I switched careers from sales, marketing and consulting to learn how to program, with the goal of making the world a better place through code. Whether that means giving people access to information, the tools and technology to level the playing field with big corporations, or empowering people in impoverished regions to participate in the world economy.

> To date, I've created more than 1,000 open source projects in an effort to reach my goal.

They're good at marketing, I'll give 'em that.

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

#230

Post by ergocoder »

n_e wrote: post #227
ergocoder wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the main message from chalk maintainers is good. Chalk maintainers basically discard the performance improvement as micro-benchmarking (i.e. "doesn't matter in the real world"). Chalk maintainers also say tree shaking doesn't matter in the real world. Why do they minimize these 2 improvements? If 2 libraries are equivalent, I'd go with the ones with extra improvements. Chalk maintainers also mentioned t…

> Chalk maintainers basically discard the performance improvement as micro-benchmarking (i.e. "doesn't matter in the real world"). Chalk maintainers also say tree shaking doesn't matter in the real world. Chalk’s purpose is to color things printed to the terminal. Unless it’s performance is atrocious, which I doubt, it doesn’t matter unless a ridiculous amount of data is printed. > Chalk maintainers also say tree sha…

> Chalk’s purpose is to color things printed to the terminal. Unless it’s performance is atrocious, which I doubt, it doesn’t matter unless a ridiculous amount of data is printed.

Chalk is downloaded 15 millions per day.

We probably can multiply how much time has wasted from 15 millions run per day. It matters collectively.

> No, they say it doesn’t matter for chalk’s use case. Which is command-line tools that are almost never tree-shaken.

Are you saying people don't package the terminal app when written in Node.js?

It matters in some cases, and it doesn't matter in some.

Chalk maintainers try to brush off these improvements, which seem like bad intents, tbh.

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