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I've Just Liberated My Modules

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Re: I've Just Liberated My Modules

#461
post #382

I like how npm even encourages you to create packages in place of the "liberated" ones when you try to visit their now missing pages: https://www.npmjs.com/package/abril-fatface abril-fatface will be yours. Oh yes, abril-fatface will be yours. mkdir abril-fatface cd abril-fatface npm init # work your magic… npm publish

That's actually their standard 404 message: https://www.npmjs.com/package/lukegt-test.

Re: I've Just Liberated My Modules

#462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use github and get namespacing under the author. IMO, this could end npmjs of they don't fix the issue.

And always use head? I think we still need versioning (potentially fuzzy). Also, isn't that what bower does/did?

You can provide any tag, sha, or branch which can be supplied as an argument to git checkout.

Re: I've Just Liberated My Modules

#463
post #215

I really just hope that this guy just didn't know what he was doing and what effect it would have. Otherwise it is totally irresponsible to mess up a big project like babel just because you control a few lines of trivial code.

Can't believe the dev is made out to be the bad guy here.

It may be a "few lines of trivial code" but it is still his code and he has the right to do whatever he wants with it. He tried the reasonable thing, NPM didn't oblige, he pulled the rug. Serves them right. If it's a few lines of "trivial code", then maybe big project Babel should stop using that "trivial code"?

And why does this yet-another-messenger-flash-in-the-pan app "Kik" get the right to mess up big projects just because they control 1 permutation of 2 letters of the English alphabet?

Re: I've Just Liberated My Modules

#464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My background is in 20th century Anglo-American philosophy, which spent a great deal of time seeing how far one can push formalization or quasi-formalization of interesting concepts. I wish I had a good capsule version of why I think this won't work, but it won't. Formalization is a tool, and an important one, and there probably are areas where a more formal approach to law could pay off. However, attempting to remov…

I just read about the Gettier problem: In my opinion one should better model knowledge as some kind of estimators for probabilities and being justified on some statistical criterion. This should in my opinion avoid the whole Gettier problem (but perhaps introduce some completely different ones?).

I prefer the definition of knowledge given by Orson Scott Card, if I'm not mistaken: something you believe to be true. It doesn't have to be justified and it doesn't even have to be true - you just have to believe it.

I know that the Moon is about 400,000 km away from the Earth. I have never measured the distance and I haven't even tried to check if it's plausible: I read it somewhere and accepted it as such.

Re: I've Just Liberated My Modules

#465
The number of coders complaining about an author exercising the basic of intellectual property rights is too high.

1) all coders should understand authors right be the code free or closed;

2) there is no excuse for someone whose value is based on creativity to ignore how IP works (the good and the bad part) because our comfortable incomes come from the protection these rights gives to our work

3) if your code is broken for 11 sloc, maybe you depend too much on others work and you have no value yourselves.

Benevolent persons sharing their code on their free time owes you nothing.

Repay authors whose code you use.

Buy closed source software, and at least respect the free software authors. It costs you nothing already.

Re: I've Just Liberated My Modules

#466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, no, but even if it did, what if a bug is found in the future? The community fixes the bug, not necessarily you!

The possibility of having bugs in code you don't control (that usually has a clause for no warranties) is an argument for implementing it yourself, not against it. Don't forget how hard it is to get a maintainer even agree on whether something is 1. a bug 2. that needs to be fixed.

Fair point. One does run the risk of having bugs in code out of their control by using a package manager such as NPM, but one gains a swath of other programmers inspecting the modules for bugs. And in module repositories for interpreted languages, its very much in your control to fix any bugs you might find, regardless of what the maintainer might say about it.

Re: I've Just Liberated My Modules

#467
post #168

One interesting thing to me, is that it is pretty clear that the kik lawyers pretty dramatically over enforced their trademark. For those who don't know, the purpose of trademarks is to prevent customer confusion; essentially we don't want people to be able to sell cheap knock-offs of someone else's thing without the general public being able to easily distinguish between them. In practical terms, trademarks are "sco…

That's not necessarily true if Kik were planning to open up some kind of API. Also, the way the law works in the US encourages corporations to overreach. If you don't try to protect your trademark from every possible angle, it can lead to your loss of it in a court battle. A lot of times, lawyers will send out letters without caring how the recipient responds -- they only need to have sent the letter at all to have c…

> A lot of times, lawyers will send out letters without caring how the recipient responds -- they only need to have sent the letter at all to have covered their bases.

That is not what happened here though.

Re: I've Just Liberated My Modules

#468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case the npm ecosystem is providing more of a surrogate standard library. Imagine if there were no libc, for example, and so people had to reimplement all those functions; would you really want one package per function because of how "Unix philosophy" it would be? This is where the JavaScript ecosystem is right now -- JS doesn't have the kind of robust standard library other languages take for granted, so you…

I don't understand the standard library argument at all. Standard library is always limited, there is always something that's not included - then what? This has nothing to do with the JavaScript standard library but the insanity of NPM. There are modules that have even more dependents than `pad-left` despite being included in the standard library (e.g. https://www.npmjs.com/package/date-now , https://www.npmjs.com/pa…

The argument is that things like formatting a string -- including padding it -- should not be add-ons, they should be built into the core distribution you get as part of the language.

Re: I've Just Liberated My Modules

#469
post #348

Reading some of the comments reminds me old tale about a young man, that every morning on his way to work passed by a beggar and gave him a coin (that was back when coins actually had some value). One morning though the beggar notices the coin is smaller than usual, and he asks: - Why you gave me a different coin today? and the young man says: - I got married and now I'm starting a family, I need more money so I can…

Doesn't this go both ways, though? NPM developed and maintains the software and servers used to publish and serve this author's packages, bringing the author fame, glory, and as the author is demonstrating, a serious megaphone, all at no cost to the author. If the author doesn't owe NPM anything, NPM shouldn't owe the author anything even for publishing these evidently valuable packages, right?
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