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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

#61

Post by thrower123 »

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 ?

Javascript is the opposite of a batteries-included language, so there is and has been an enormous amount of wasted effort duplicating functionality that should have been in a standard library.

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

#62

Post by shakna »

andix wrote: post #21

This seems to be a completely normal fork. This is not the first time that happens to open source software, and is an important part of the open source ecosystem. Off course forks are not a nice thing for the original authors, but a lot of good things happened because of forks. Libreoffice, Xorg, and many more. The original package was MIT licensed, so this is totally legal and okay to do so If there is a good reason…

> The original package was MIT licensed, so this is totally legal and okay to do so

The MIT license requires attribution. The attribution was removed until the author was called out publicly, so... No. This was not totally legal and okay to do so.

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

#63

Post by afiori »

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…

the work being pirated is not the code but its place in the library marketplace, the license played a minimal role here (as it was infringed anyway)

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

#64

Post by danw1979 »

lmilcin wrote: post #51
woodruffw wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’d be helpful for anyone downvoting this to point out the factual error that I can’t see.

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

#65

Post by toastercat »

https://twitter.com/equinusocio/status/1441732243727192087?s...

> You should think this "wow, the author of one of the most popular frontend tools of today just used my work as reference. It's an honor."

By far my favorite and most ridiculous tweet I've seen in this thread.

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

#66

Post by hyperapp »

Narretz wrote: post #3

It looks like nanocolors is a fork of colorette with a few (substantial?) changes, see https://github.com/ai/nanocolors/wiki/Colorette-Changes . However, the author of nanocolors, Andrey Sitnik, only added attribution info about colorette after Jorge Bucaran went public about the fork on Twitter. If the fork had attributed colorette from the start, would there be drama here?

Colorette author here. I put the benchmarks in a CI workflow so anyone can check. Click Benchmarks to see the results:

https://github.com/jorgebucaran/color-bench-test/runs/371243...

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

#68

Post by pabs3 »

thrower123 wrote: post #61
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 ?

Javascript is the opposite of a batteries-included language, so there is and has been an enormous amount of wasted effort duplicating functionality that should have been in a standard library.

Are there any movements towards creating a standard library for JavaScript (or at least server-side JS)?

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

#69

Post by YetAnotherNick »

thrower123 wrote: post #60
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...

Why? You could use GPL package in MIT licensed library.

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

#70

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]
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