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I wrote my own thoughts on this on Reddit recently[1], excerpt: > BetaFish Inc, owner of AdBlock, paid to acquire control of the GitHub repository and control

I wrote my own thoughts on this on Reddit recently[1], excerpt: > BetaFish Inc, owner of AdBlock, paid to acquire control of the GitHub repository and control of the ublock.org site last year. The apparent goal was to keep the deception ongoing, and further increase it, as clearly the site is trying to game search engines so to rank ublock.org high in results. They also registered the trademark "uBlock" in Germany, and have been pulling code from "uBlock Origin" repo. > Nothing that they are doing is user friendly, it's to deceive people who are looking to install "uBlock Origin" into installing "uBlock" instead. * * * [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/b8vr9j/got_fooled_into_installing_ublockorg_chrome/ek0yaao/ https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/b8vr9j/got_fo...

wnevets 7y ago
>paid to acquire control of the GitHub repository Paid who?
- ihuman 7y ago
  I think Chris Aljoudi > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBlock_Origin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBlock_Origin > Through April and May 2015, the uBlock project was forked by Chris Aljoudi, while uBlock Origin reflected the continuing effort by the original developer Raymond Hill. Since April 2015, uBlock Origin has been completely unrelated to the web site ublock.org. > Shortly after the project division [between uBlock and uBlock Origin], Chris Aljoudi created ublock.org to host uBlock, promote the extension and request donations... In July 2018, uBlock was acquired by AdBlock.
  - fireattack 7y ago
    The wording on Wikipedia doesn't seem to match what actually happened. IIRC, Raymond Hill, the original author of uBlock and current maintainer of uBlock Origin, voluntarily gave the control of uBlock project to Chris Aljoudi because he was tired of dealing with all the bug reports/issues (and Aljoudi offered to take it over, I think). But due to various reasons, shortly (very shortly, maybe even no gap in between) after, he self-forked uBlock [1] to make uBlock Origin and started to work on it again. So technically uBlock Origin is the fork, and more importantly, Chris Aljoudi didn't really "fork uBlock", he inherited the main repo. Note: I'm by no means to defend Aljoudi's practice on uBlock and I'm pretty sure Hill regretted his decision of handing it over. But let's avoid historical revisionism. [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20150427225211/https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/ https://web.archive.org/web/20150427225211/https://github.co... (See the "forked from chrisaljoudi/uBlock" text and readme.MD below) --- Edit: [2] Hill's own words about this matter on Apr 11, 2015: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/38#issuecomment-91871802 https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/38#issuecomment-918...
    - AnaniasAnanas 7y ago
      Please correct me if I am mistaken, but wasn't https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock where the original uBlock was hosted at? Gorhill might had declared Raymond to be the "owner" of uBlock but to me it is not clear that uBlock Origin is a fork by any means.
      - fireattack 7y ago
        It was. But he later fully transferred (everything, including stars issues and whatever) the repo to Aljoudi (you can do that on GitHub) so it was under Aljoudi's namespace. Then, Hill forked it back, which eventually became the repo for uBlock Origin we have today. It doesn't show "forked from xxx" any more today for reasons I don't know (maybe he recreated it?), but you can still see it in the archive version of it I linked above (you can also check older dates and Chris' one, to show the transfer more clearly).
        AnaniasAnanas 7y ago
        Interesting, I did not know that you could transfer repos this way on github, thanks.
clairity 7y ago
thank you for ublock (origin). i was almost fooled into installing the wrong extension when the ublock fork happened. it's shameful that someone would try to take advantage of your hard work like that.
lima 7y ago
Did you give away your (implicit) trademark rights to Chris? Simply giving ownership to a GitHub repo might not be a license.
phonypc 7y ago
Well this is embarrassing... just double checked what I have installed after reading this, thinking I surely had uBlock Origin. Nope. Fixed now. Thanks for your work.

wnevets 7y ago

>paid to acquire control of the GitHub repository Paid who?

ihuman 7y ago
I think Chris Aljoudi > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBlock_Origin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBlock_Origin > Through April and May 2015, the uBlock project was forked by Chris Aljoudi, while uBlock Origin reflected the continuing effort by the original developer Raymond Hill. Since April 2015, uBlock Origin has been completely unrelated to the web site ublock.org. > Shortly after the project division [between uBlock and uBlock Origin], Chris Aljoudi created ublock.org to host uBlock, promote the extension and request donations... In July 2018, uBlock was acquired by AdBlock.
- fireattack 7y ago
  The wording on Wikipedia doesn't seem to match what actually happened. IIRC, Raymond Hill, the original author of uBlock and current maintainer of uBlock Origin, voluntarily gave the control of uBlock project to Chris Aljoudi because he was tired of dealing with all the bug reports/issues (and Aljoudi offered to take it over, I think). But due to various reasons, shortly (very shortly, maybe even no gap in between) after, he self-forked uBlock [1] to make uBlock Origin and started to work on it again. So technically uBlock Origin is the fork, and more importantly, Chris Aljoudi didn't really "fork uBlock", he inherited the main repo. Note: I'm by no means to defend Aljoudi's practice on uBlock and I'm pretty sure Hill regretted his decision of handing it over. But let's avoid historical revisionism. [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20150427225211/https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/ https://web.archive.org/web/20150427225211/https://github.co... (See the "forked from chrisaljoudi/uBlock" text and readme.MD below) --- Edit: [2] Hill's own words about this matter on Apr 11, 2015: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/38#issuecomment-91871802 https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/38#issuecomment-918...
  - AnaniasAnanas 7y ago
    Please correct me if I am mistaken, but wasn't https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock where the original uBlock was hosted at? Gorhill might had declared Raymond to be the "owner" of uBlock but to me it is not clear that uBlock Origin is a fork by any means.
    - fireattack 7y ago
      It was. But he later fully transferred (everything, including stars issues and whatever) the repo to Aljoudi (you can do that on GitHub) so it was under Aljoudi's namespace. Then, Hill forked it back, which eventually became the repo for uBlock Origin we have today. It doesn't show "forked from xxx" any more today for reasons I don't know (maybe he recreated it?), but you can still see it in the archive version of it I linked above (you can also check older dates and Chris' one, to show the transfer more clearly).
      - AnaniasAnanas 7y ago
        Interesting, I did not know that you could transfer repos this way on github, thanks.

clairity 7y ago

thank you for ublock (origin). i was almost fooled into installing the wrong extension when the ublock fork happened. it's shameful that someone would try to take advantage of your hard work like that.

lima 7y ago

Did you give away your (implicit) trademark rights to Chris? Simply giving ownership to a GitHub repo might not be a license.

phonypc 7y ago

Well this is embarrassing... just double checked what I have installed after reading this, thinking I surely had uBlock Origin. Nope. Fixed now. Thanks for your work.