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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

#51

Post by lmilcin »

woodruffw wrote: post #41
ctvo wrote: post #38

I'm losing my mind with people who keep replying with "That's open source baby! Don't make it open source if you don't like!" The problem with this behavior is as follows: - The MIT license requires attribution of the original work. The author contacted the person who forked this privately [1]. It wasn't done until the Twitter thread. - Questionably the fork was renamed and didn't include git history to make the firs…

I was on the forker’s side of things until those last two points: I don’t think anybody should have to justify creating a fork, but the (seemingly intentional) stripping of the revision history and absence of attribution indicates a bad actor to me.

It does not indicate a bad actor. It is bad actor. Attribution is not a "wish" of the original creator that you should feel morally obliged to follow. It is a legal prerequisite of you being allowed to make a fork of it for free, under the licence given by the author.

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

#52

Post by mmastrac »

I think the forker here just crossed one of those invisible lines by a collection of actions that smell bad when seen as a whole.

He forked, stripped attribution and history [+] (license violation, but on its own probably just rises to the level of minor dickishness and is often a misunderstanding)

He started advertising his fork to replace the originally forked repo (a bit rude).

If the original library was unmaintained or unused, this probably would have been a big nothing-burger. But apparently the library that was quietly forked had a fairly big install base and contributing to that library first would have been a better choice.

What is missing from the discussion (and often unaccounted for in licenses themselves) is that there's a massive personal value to having a library used by large numbers of people.

[+] EDIT (to clarify): as gcr points out, this was not a standard github-style fork but rather a copy and re-commit as original history.

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

#53

Post by dandanua »

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…

That's just bullying from Sitnik. Stealing the entire repository and then blaming the victim for stealing a few letters back.

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

#54

Post by lillecarl »

linkdd wrote: post #19
caslon wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was necessary to demonstrate that there was no need to falsely recall it. You could just read it. It's three lines, takes about thirty seconds to read carefully, and would have saved you the trouble of posting misinformation.

It was not necessary. I would have (and I did) edit my comment to rectify my error. I did not claim I was "sure", which is the point of "IIRC". Calling this misinformation is a bit exaggerated. You can choose to be kind.

You can also choose to read up on essential facts before posting. When people send me emails that require me to go out of my way to interpret and understand because they withheld easily accessible information (usually because of their laziness to type) I answer with a "?" and remove the email.

IIRC isn't necessary when the content is clearly and easily accessible for you to read, I would prefer to not have to read comments based on vague memory when the facts are right there. This is netiquette.

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

#55

Post by seer »

ronenlh wrote: post #2

There’s a discussion about this in GitHub: https://github.com/babel/babel/pull/13783

From that discussion it seems @ai (the fork author) did conduct himself in the spirit of open source, or at least it could plausibly be said so.

- contributed to the original project for a year

- forked the original project only after the author did not agree with the his requests/prs

- (turned out this was done latter after it became publicized) kept the commit history as well as attributing the author in the docs

- All in accordance to license (MIT)

- modified/improved on the original project in his fork.

It looks like he performed the fork after the original author moved the project in an undesirable direction. I mean what else would could he have done?

Isn’t the awesome part about open source that if someone changes their lib underneath you, in a way that you do not like, you _can_ fork it and keep it in the direction you desire. And after that “the market” decides which direction was more to the users liking?

I’ve been ripped off by others as well and know the feeling of betrayal when you see someone getting praise for work they have not done, but this seems hardly the case here.

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

#56

Post by detaro »

seer wrote: post #55
ronenlh wrote: post #2

There’s a discussion about this in GitHub: https://github.com/babel/babel/pull/13783

From that discussion it seems @ai (the fork author) did conduct himself in the spirit of open source, or at least it could plausibly be said so. - contributed to the original project for a year - forked the original project only after the author did not agree with the his requests/prs - (turned out this was done latter after it became publicized) kept the commit history as well as attributing the author in the docs -…

> kept the commit history as well as attributing the author in the docs

He didn't. He added that after being publicly called out on it.

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

#57

Post by krono »

oolonthegreat wrote: post #25

it's also worth pointing out the author of nanocolors https://github.com/ai has multiple PRs in the last few days asking libraries to replace chalk/colorette with his nanocolors. smells bad to me but maybe that's how the whole thing works.

He does seem very aggressive in his attempts to get this into as many popular packages (and/or onto as many machines) as he can in the shortest amount of time.

According to the original project's author, he even silently removed loads of edge case handlers until he was called out on it [0]. That seems to have been a really quick and dirty tactic to get his performance numbers up.

My spidey senses are tingling too.

[0] https://github.com/ai/nanocolors/pull/14#issuecomment-927152...

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

#58

Post by seer »

detaro wrote: post #56
seer wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From that discussion it seems @ai (the fork author) did conduct himself in the spirit of open source, or at least it could plausibly be said so. - contributed to the original project for a year - forked the original project only after the author did not agree with the his requests/prs - (turned out this was done latter after it became publicized) kept the commit history as well as attributing the author in the docs -…

> kept the commit history as well as attributing the author in the docs He didn't. He added that after being publicly called out on it.

oh ok, missed that little wrinkle, but its there now at least

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

#59

Post by shakna »

gopiandcode wrote: post #16
svalorzen wrote: post #5

Every time there is a post like this I go check the license of the original project. Invariably, it is MIT. I think this is probably indicative of something, although I couldn't say what.

I think it's likely indicative of the fact that the JS ecosystem doesn't really understand the meaning of open source (or the distinction between "open source" and free/libre software). The author's comments are quite enlightening of their incomplete understanding of the licenses they use: > nanocolors implementation and API are the same as > Colorette. You essentially pirated my work. After using a license that expl…

> After using a license that explicitly allows others to take their work, it's suprising the author thinks that someone "pirated" their work.

He stripped the license when he created his fork. (Only adding it after the thread on Twitter became actively noticed).

How is that _not_ pirating?

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

#60

Post by thrower123 »

svalorzen wrote: post #5

Every time there is a post like this I go check the license of the original project. Invariably, it is MIT. I think this is probably indicative of something, although I couldn't say what.

Everything in the npm ecosystem pretty much has to be MIT, or none of it would work.

You could poison most of the web dev ecosystem by changing the license on a handful of packages to GPL...

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