Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 309 posts

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

#291

Post by tomxor »

fenomas wrote: post #148
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 don't think this is a fair framing. This isn't left-pad - it's a library that abstracts something people find annoying, and finding the right abstraction can be difficult even if the final code doesn't seem complicated. Add in a few years of bug fixes and whatnot, and it seems pretty rude to dismiss the result as "easily replicable from scratch".

I think I made it clear enough that I was suggesting these packages are somewhere above the one-liners. While I agree finding the right abstraction is useful and takes time, I find it hard to apply that to a package that provides a function that wraps strings... I think it's fair to say that it's somewhat useful, but easy to replicate from scratch, and that's ok it deserves to exist - it does however considerably affect how different people perceive it's value.

But perhaps for contrast we should compare to the other end of the spectrum... Intel uses Minix3 in intelME which is part of every modern intel CPU [0]. Minix3 has a 3 clause BSD license which requires reproducing the copyright notice for basic attribution [1]. Which they failed to reproduce. Now in Tanenbaum's public letter, he politely suggested it would have been courteous if they had merely informed him of what it was being used for [2]... no mention of lack of attribution, no hysteria, no invoking of the mob on twitter, he didn't make even 1/10th the fuss this NPM package developer made.

Lets cut to the chase: The difference between these two people is that one cares about attribution way more than contributing to FOSS. They care about it to such a degree that makes me uncomfortable to touch their code, in-case of any perceived injustice against them or missed opportunity for self-promotion.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine#Hardwa...

[1] https://github.com/minix3/minix/blob/master/LICENSE

[2] https://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/intel/

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

#292

Post by mrozbarry »

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…

While I think you have a valid point about the javascript community reinventing the wheel often, the problem in this thread is simply that some people are inconsiderate, rude, and hostile, and that is in every software community and ecosystem in some way or another.

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

#293

Post by jsploit »

Bobylonian wrote: post #287
jsploit wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That does not at all explain their overly aggressive approach and (initial) lack of attribution.

It explains their course of action, as Jorge was not flexible in his "my way or highway" approach. And I would also either ditch or fork earlier version, if maintainer of API is sabotaging my project. IMO, making fork, instead of integrating or writing their own(without the need to acknowledge original author due to significant changes to a code) shows struggle of dealing with this situation. I think that it is too h…

> It explains their course of action, as Jorge was not flexible in his "my way or highway" approach.

I don't understand where this conclusion is coming from as it doesn't seem Andrey raised any concerns with colorette prior to his aggressive actions.

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

#294

Post by Lammy »

zkldi wrote: post #153

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 al…

See also, the "StandardRB" wrapper around somebody's RuboCop config:

https://github.com/testdouble/standard

https://github.com/testdouble/standard/blob/main/config/base...

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

#295

Post by jorgre »

awestroke wrote: post #126

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

I'm that person, but that's not exactly what I did.

Wahoo, a framework I had built, became the base for the then, new Oh My Fish.

I, myself, committed[1] it into the Oh My Fish repository, effectively replacing everything but the name. This was a huge change.

Regrettably, I didn't include a migration strategy, and ended up breaking other things down the line because of that. This and poor communication on my part, eventually led to a fallout with the other maintainer and I exited the project. So, I asked them to revert my changes or provide full attribution.

Reverting my changes would've made no sense at that point, and I realize that.

Attribution was left as "Copyright (c) 2015, Oh My Fish!". That didn't do it for me. My name was not anywhere. Ironically, my name is now almost everywhere Oh My Fish is brought up.

Filling a DMCA notice was my careless reaction to the situation. I know that I could've handled it better. I wasn't at my best.

[1] https://github.com/oh-my-fish/oh-my-fish/commit/2693a2fd18bd...

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

#296

Post by Lammy »

woodruffw wrote: post #226
datenarsch wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I took it to mean a second definition describing a particular aesthetic identity, e.g. dark-mode everything, tiny and/or monospace fonts, use of the word "rice" as a verb, etc. I'm totally down for two of those so this isn't said with disdain ;)

Perhaps "hax0r" would be more appropriate.

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

#297

Post by Lammy »

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.

And effectively censorship since such a comment will end up as the last child of its parent and with a text-color barely darker than the page background. Or hidden entirely if a couple people hit "flag" instead since "showdead" is opt-in.

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

#298

Post by Lammy »

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.

https://catandgirl.com/riddle-me-this/

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

#299

Post by Lammy »

ergocoder wrote: post #230
n_e wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a…

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

The benchmark measurements they're discussing are on the order of tens-of-millions of operations per second: https://github.com/ai/nanocolors#benchmarks

Are the contents of your terminal changing that frequently?

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

#300

Post by hitekker »

tomxor wrote: post #291
fenomas wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is a fair framing. This isn't left-pad - it's a library that abstracts something people find annoying, and finding the right abstraction can be difficult even if the final code doesn't seem complicated. Add in a few years of bug fixes and whatnot, and it seems pretty rude to dismiss the result as "easily replicable from scratch".

I think I made it clear enough that I was suggesting these packages are somewhere above the one-liners. While I agree finding the right abstraction is useful and takes time, I find it hard to apply that to a package that provides a function that wraps strings... I think it's fair to say that it's somewhat useful, but easy to replicate from scratch, and that's ok it deserves to exist - it does however considerably aff…

The difference is that someone pirated another person's software and tried to get away with it. Then that person's fan club wrote a bunch of nonsense to distract, deflect and cloud their malfeasance.

Attribution may not be a concern for career criminals but FOSS tries to stay on the side of the law. Otherwise, projects risk being "tainted" by copy-pasted code that could lead to even larger legal repercussions. ReactOS had its development shut down in 2006 because of mere allegations; they had to prove all their code was written by themselves

https://reactos.org/project-news/reset-reboot-restart-legal-...

Post reply on HN