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Submitted this here as the issue first got raised in another submission I participated in (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25100810 https://news.ycombinato

Submitted this here as the issue first got raised in another submission I participated in (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25100810 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25100810). Let me guess how this will go 1. This issue will get traction on HN and maybe Twitter 2. Facebook engineers responsible will apologize, tell us they meant no harm 3. Facebook will change the name of the project and give it back to it's rightful owner, maybe even reinstate their Facebook account (although unlikely) 4. In 3-6 months the very same thing will happen and we'll go back to step 1 Hopefully at one point the engineers at Facebook (at least the ones that hang around HN) will realize what their employer does to the open source ecosystem and finally leave the company. This is not the first case, and will not be the last case of similar things happening. But when you're getting a large salary that is hard to get elsewhere, I guess it's really hard to leave. Edit: HNers please! Don't fill the issue with any more comments as it's likely to be locked and not really achieve anything more than that (specifically looking at you " dsignr")

umvi 6y ago
Well I'd rather it be like this than the opposite extreme where companies take any (MIT licensed) software they want but never give back or publish FOSS of their own
- capableweb 6y ago
  Yeah, fuck any type of balance in the world right? It's either stealing software or never give back to FOSS, no middle grounds here.
  - Lammy 6y ago
    This comment is the one that seems to be two extremes with no balance. Those companies make absurd amounts of money and would not be able to be nearly as profitable (or maybe even exist at all!) without FOSS scaffolding to build on. It's a power imbalance. Any giving back they do in terms of money or manpower is peanuts compared to what their top-earners are pocketing. Dear downvoters: I have worked at these companies too. I've been the one doing the pocketing. Is my experience not valid enough to speak?
    - capableweb 6y ago
      > This comment is the one that seems to be two extremes with no balance Indeed. Frustrated with the black & white view from umvi I responded with my extreme view. I'm sorry about that. I agree with you that companies should, if they can, contribute back to open source, either with funds or time spent contributing to the project. I only responded like that because I don't think it's either "companies take open source and never contribute" OR "companies take open source, overwrite the license holder and doesn't credit the author". I think the issue is much more nuanced than that, but I let my feelings write my previous comment.
  - umvi 6y ago
    That's not what I meant. And clearly Facebook isn't currently at the extreme yet. Facebook doesn't just steal - it seems like it happens every once in a while, but they have given lots of FOSS gifts to the world that have genuinely improved web development.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  If you don't like companies using MIT-licensed software under the terms of the license, then don't publish your software with the MIT license.
  - Xylakant 6y ago
    Without judging the merits or truthfulness of the claims, the author of the MIT licensed software is alleging two things: * taking the name of an MIT licensed thing which is entirely not covered by the License and I’d at least consider that bad form. * A breach of the MIT license by the Facebook engineer - specifically removing the license and passing it off as their own work. So the author is not - as you seem to imply - complaining about someone using their software under the MIT license.
    - doc_gunthrop 6y ago
      Perhaps someone with some experience dealing with violations of MIT licenses can chime in on this. How different does one project's code have to be from another similar project before you can claim copyright and slap your own license on it? If a dev simply copied the entirety of someone's code and simply renamed some variables, could they claim it's their own original work (without worry of legal recourse)? I'd figure not, in which case, how much of a difference is different enough?
      - Xylakant 6y ago
        > if a dev simply copied the entirety of someone's code and simply renamed some variables, could they claim it's their own original work (without worry of legal recourse)? I'd figure not, in which case, how much of a difference is different enough? This would most definitely not be enough. That would basically make all licenses useless - commercial and noncommercial alike. The MIT license is no different than any other license in that regard. In case of the MIT license, whenever I copy any code (files or parts), I always place a comment right next to the section, pointing to the source of the copy and containing the license of the code/copyright marker. Honestly, what’s the cost? My ego doesn’t take a hit from admitting that I found and adapted something useful. The possible uses of the code are unaffected. License situation is clarified for audits. The original author gets credit for their work. There’s only upsides.
noxer 6y ago
And once again HN is abused as a personal internet army. Fck this sit! This is NOT NEWS and its clearly against the HN guidelines to post this cap here why is no one moderating this? It only gets worse if its successful.
- gpm 6y ago
  > clearly against the HN guidelines Which part of them exactly? Seems like something or interest to hackers, so it would generally be on topic but for an exception.
  - noxer 6y ago
    On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. (Who find something interesting that posted here every other week?) Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports (This one goes under politics potential under crime too, and for FB this seem to be a sport.) But yeha the real problem is that people abuse HN for their own personal problems as an internet attention generator.
    - capableweb 6y ago
      > that people abuse HN for their own personal problems Just the record, the person who wrote the issue (and is affected by the problem) and the person submitting to HN is not the same person. So I'm unsure how I could be claimed to use HN for my own personal problems, when I'm not the one with the issue here.
      - colejohnson66 6y ago
        Not that you did, but it could be argued that because it’s Facebook (and we’re on HN), you were looking for something to post that’s negative about them because “fsck FB.”
      - noxer 6y ago
        Doesn't really matter and there is no way to know if the HN poster is the affected person or not. What we know is that it creates an incentive for affected people to post future problems like that here if we keep giving these posts attention until they are resolved.
ownagefool 6y ago
Devils advocate here: "label-actions" is a name straight from the github nomenclature, and a (very) quick look at the code and syntax suggests this isn't a fork. I could totally believe the inspiration came from the older project, but I could also believe it didn't, and I'm not so sure the OP should own the name.
- capableweb 6y ago
  This thread has more information: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25100810 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25100810 Short answer, it was copied from author then changed. Commit here: https://github.com/facebook/react-native/commit/f9c2157141b8fcddcb2d2c576c952f2ce7daedda#diff-5d2241a2aa7c8754bda9b7ce7ea952e4e3313afebfedfc40d4274298ba11765e https://github.com/facebook/react-native/commit/f9c2157141b8...
  - ratww 6y ago
    This seems to be just a configuration file in React Native, not really a "copy" of the project in question. Apparently one of the Facebook developers reimplemented everything from scratch in his own account and then changed config files in the React Native repo to use his own implementation. If it was a clean-room implementation then there's nothing wrong with that. Apart from reusing the name, but that's another discussion.
    - gpm 6y ago
      > If it was a clean-room implementation then there's nothing wrong with that. Except potentially trademark infringement (common law tradmark rights are acquired automatically - but the name is pretty generic), and potentially still copyright infringement if Oracle wins Oracle v. Google and there is enough creativity in the sequence structure and organization of the api for it to be subject to copyright/not fair use...
      - xenocratus 6y ago
        > common law tradmark rights are acquired automatically - but the name is pretty generic I was wondering about that, because there are obviously many open source projects out there who share a name, some owned by companies, some by individuals. Here's a Google GitHub Page that talks about OSS trademarking in general: https://google.github.io/opencasebook/trademarks/#common-law-trademarks https://google.github.io/opencasebook/trademarks/#common-law... > Primarily, an unregistered mark must be: (1) used in commerce, and (2) used prior to the alleged trademark infringement. It may be counterintuitive that the “use in commerce” requirement does not necessarily mean a profitable or profit-seeking use. In fact, as the following case clarifies, the term “use in commerce” is used as a reference to Congress’s authority to regulate trademarks under the U.S. Constitution’s Commerce Clause rather than an intent to limit trademarks to profit-making activity. Where a developer released open source software under the name Coolmail, the court rejected the argument that the lack of direct profit from releasing software under the GNU General Public License rendered the original Coolmail name unenforceable as a trademark, holding that distributing software for end-users over the Internet satisfies the “use in commerce” requirement.
pvg 6y ago
Edit: HNers please! Github issues is itself a forum and cross-linking forums like this, especially with the explicit goal of mutual pile-on amplification causes problems. The solution is to not make such submissions to HN (and to flag the ones that appear).
macspoofing 6y ago
I agree and I am also reasonably sure it will go down as you said it will ... the problem is there is no fix. These corporate behemoths will always intentionally, or unintentionally step on people - and I say this with no animosity towards them. It is what it is. They are huge organizations with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of employees. An elephant will not try to hurt an ant, but may step on one.
- type0 6y ago
  Yeah but in this case it is the ant-eating beast
neolog 6y ago
> what their employer does to the open source ecosystem Does facebook habitually copy stuff without attribution?
- dtech 6y ago
  At least with videos there's a problem with videos copied from other places and monetized on Facebook, especially because they boost the FB-hosted videos over external videos and do fuck-all about it.
dang 6y ago
> HNers please! Don't fill the issue with any more comments as it's likely to be locked and not really achieve anything more than that (specifically looking at you " dsignr") I don't think that's fair. If you didn't want to stoke internet drama, the thing to do would have been not to submit it to HN in the first place. Having submitted it, it's unsporting to put the onus on others to de-escalate, and singling out a particular user feels particularly distasteful. Edit: also, comments like these stoke further escalation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25103613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25103613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25103873 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25103873 Please don't use HN for this, and please don't target people personally. That's leaving the path of curious conversation: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- choppaface 6y ago
  > If you didn't want to stoke internet drama, the thing to do would have been not to submit it to HN in the first place One of the most important phenomena in tech, especially at the large-scale system (technical) & open source (social) levels, is emergent behavior: your complex system will likely react in ways you'd never expect. The HN guidelines keep this in mind and are designed to inspire curiosity and humility. However, the quoted moderator narrative appears to pin the blame on the OP; there's a non-zero affect of "you should have know better." Should he? A ton of posts like these get squashed or ignored, some much less thoughtful ones get celebrated, and the attitude towards big companies like Facebook or Google has changed over the years. COVID has additionally made people behave in unexpected ways. It's really hard to predict the reaction of the crowd these days. I have been deeply disappointed with the HN moderation in the past few months. At the very least, a "you should have known better" message should be delivered in private and not posted as conspicuously as this one.
  - dang 6y ago
    I'm afraid I'm not really following most of your points here, but you may be right that my GP comment was excessive. It's always best to avoid shaming and easy to go too far.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

umvi 6y ago

Well I'd rather it be like this than the opposite extreme where companies take any (MIT licensed) software they want but never give back or publish FOSS of their own

capableweb 6y ago
Yeah, fuck any type of balance in the world right? It's either stealing software or never give back to FOSS, no middle grounds here.
- Lammy 6y ago
  This comment is the one that seems to be two extremes with no balance. Those companies make absurd amounts of money and would not be able to be nearly as profitable (or maybe even exist at all!) without FOSS scaffolding to build on. It's a power imbalance. Any giving back they do in terms of money or manpower is peanuts compared to what their top-earners are pocketing. Dear downvoters: I have worked at these companies too. I've been the one doing the pocketing. Is my experience not valid enough to speak?
  - capableweb 6y ago
    > This comment is the one that seems to be two extremes with no balance Indeed. Frustrated with the black & white view from umvi I responded with my extreme view. I'm sorry about that. I agree with you that companies should, if they can, contribute back to open source, either with funds or time spent contributing to the project. I only responded like that because I don't think it's either "companies take open source and never contribute" OR "companies take open source, overwrite the license holder and doesn't credit the author". I think the issue is much more nuanced than that, but I let my feelings write my previous comment.
- umvi 6y ago
  That's not what I meant. And clearly Facebook isn't currently at the extreme yet. Facebook doesn't just steal - it seems like it happens every once in a while, but they have given lots of FOSS gifts to the world that have genuinely improved web development.
yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
If you don't like companies using MIT-licensed software under the terms of the license, then don't publish your software with the MIT license.
- Xylakant 6y ago
  Without judging the merits or truthfulness of the claims, the author of the MIT licensed software is alleging two things: * taking the name of an MIT licensed thing which is entirely not covered by the License and I’d at least consider that bad form. * A breach of the MIT license by the Facebook engineer - specifically removing the license and passing it off as their own work. So the author is not - as you seem to imply - complaining about someone using their software under the MIT license.
  - doc_gunthrop 6y ago
    Perhaps someone with some experience dealing with violations of MIT licenses can chime in on this. How different does one project's code have to be from another similar project before you can claim copyright and slap your own license on it? If a dev simply copied the entirety of someone's code and simply renamed some variables, could they claim it's their own original work (without worry of legal recourse)? I'd figure not, in which case, how much of a difference is different enough?
    - Xylakant 6y ago
      > if a dev simply copied the entirety of someone's code and simply renamed some variables, could they claim it's their own original work (without worry of legal recourse)? I'd figure not, in which case, how much of a difference is different enough? This would most definitely not be enough. That would basically make all licenses useless - commercial and noncommercial alike. The MIT license is no different than any other license in that regard. In case of the MIT license, whenever I copy any code (files or parts), I always place a comment right next to the section, pointing to the source of the copy and containing the license of the code/copyright marker. Honestly, what’s the cost? My ego doesn’t take a hit from admitting that I found and adapted something useful. The possible uses of the code are unaffected. License situation is clarified for audits. The original author gets credit for their work. There’s only upsides.

noxer 6y ago

And once again HN is abused as a personal internet army. Fck this sit! This is NOT NEWS and its clearly against the HN guidelines to post this cap here why is no one moderating this? It only gets worse if its successful.

gpm 6y ago
> clearly against the HN guidelines Which part of them exactly? Seems like something or interest to hackers, so it would generally be on topic but for an exception.
- noxer 6y ago
  On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. (Who find something interesting that posted here every other week?) Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports (This one goes under politics potential under crime too, and for FB this seem to be a sport.) But yeha the real problem is that people abuse HN for their own personal problems as an internet attention generator.
  - capableweb 6y ago
    > that people abuse HN for their own personal problems Just the record, the person who wrote the issue (and is affected by the problem) and the person submitting to HN is not the same person. So I'm unsure how I could be claimed to use HN for my own personal problems, when I'm not the one with the issue here.
    - colejohnson66 6y ago
      Not that you did, but it could be argued that because it’s Facebook (and we’re on HN), you were looking for something to post that’s negative about them because “fsck FB.”
    - noxer 6y ago
      Doesn't really matter and there is no way to know if the HN poster is the affected person or not. What we know is that it creates an incentive for affected people to post future problems like that here if we keep giving these posts attention until they are resolved.

ownagefool 6y ago

Devils advocate here: "label-actions" is a name straight from the github nomenclature, and a (very) quick look at the code and syntax suggests this isn't a fork. I could totally believe the inspiration came from the older project, but I could also believe it didn't, and I'm not so sure the OP should own the name.

capableweb 6y ago
This thread has more information: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25100810 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25100810 Short answer, it was copied from author then changed. Commit here: https://github.com/facebook/react-native/commit/f9c2157141b8fcddcb2d2c576c952f2ce7daedda#diff-5d2241a2aa7c8754bda9b7ce7ea952e4e3313afebfedfc40d4274298ba11765e https://github.com/facebook/react-native/commit/f9c2157141b8...
- ratww 6y ago
  This seems to be just a configuration file in React Native, not really a "copy" of the project in question. Apparently one of the Facebook developers reimplemented everything from scratch in his own account and then changed config files in the React Native repo to use his own implementation. If it was a clean-room implementation then there's nothing wrong with that. Apart from reusing the name, but that's another discussion.
  - gpm 6y ago
    > If it was a clean-room implementation then there's nothing wrong with that. Except potentially trademark infringement (common law tradmark rights are acquired automatically - but the name is pretty generic), and potentially still copyright infringement if Oracle wins Oracle v. Google and there is enough creativity in the sequence structure and organization of the api for it to be subject to copyright/not fair use...
    - xenocratus 6y ago
      > common law tradmark rights are acquired automatically - but the name is pretty generic I was wondering about that, because there are obviously many open source projects out there who share a name, some owned by companies, some by individuals. Here's a Google GitHub Page that talks about OSS trademarking in general: https://google.github.io/opencasebook/trademarks/#common-law-trademarks https://google.github.io/opencasebook/trademarks/#common-law... > Primarily, an unregistered mark must be: (1) used in commerce, and (2) used prior to the alleged trademark infringement. It may be counterintuitive that the “use in commerce” requirement does not necessarily mean a profitable or profit-seeking use. In fact, as the following case clarifies, the term “use in commerce” is used as a reference to Congress’s authority to regulate trademarks under the U.S. Constitution’s Commerce Clause rather than an intent to limit trademarks to profit-making activity. Where a developer released open source software under the name Coolmail, the court rejected the argument that the lack of direct profit from releasing software under the GNU General Public License rendered the original Coolmail name unenforceable as a trademark, holding that distributing software for end-users over the Internet satisfies the “use in commerce” requirement.

pvg 6y ago

Edit: HNers please! Github issues is itself a forum and cross-linking forums like this, especially with the explicit goal of mutual pile-on amplification causes problems. The solution is to not make such submissions to HN (and to flag the ones that appear).

macspoofing 6y ago

I agree and I am also reasonably sure it will go down as you said it will ... the problem is there is no fix. These corporate behemoths will always intentionally, or unintentionally step on people - and I say this with no animosity towards them. It is what it is. They are huge organizations with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of employees. An elephant will not try to hurt an ant, but may step on one.

type0 6y ago
Yeah but in this case it is the ant-eating beast

neolog 6y ago

> what their employer does to the open source ecosystem Does facebook habitually copy stuff without attribution?

dtech 6y ago
At least with videos there's a problem with videos copied from other places and monetized on Facebook, especially because they boost the FB-hosted videos over external videos and do fuck-all about it.

dang 6y ago

> HNers please! Don't fill the issue with any more comments as it's likely to be locked and not really achieve anything more than that (specifically looking at you " dsignr") I don't think that's fair. If you didn't want to stoke internet drama, the thing to do would have been not to submit it to HN in the first place. Having submitted it, it's unsporting to put the onus on others to de-escalate, and singling out a particular user feels particularly distasteful. Edit: also, comments like these stoke further escalation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25103613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25103613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25103873 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25103873 Please don't use HN for this, and please don't target people personally. That's leaving the path of curious conversation: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

choppaface 6y ago
> If you didn't want to stoke internet drama, the thing to do would have been not to submit it to HN in the first place One of the most important phenomena in tech, especially at the large-scale system (technical) & open source (social) levels, is emergent behavior: your complex system will likely react in ways you'd never expect. The HN guidelines keep this in mind and are designed to inspire curiosity and humility. However, the quoted moderator narrative appears to pin the blame on the OP; there's a non-zero affect of "you should have know better." Should he? A ton of posts like these get squashed or ignored, some much less thoughtful ones get celebrated, and the attitude towards big companies like Facebook or Google has changed over the years. COVID has additionally made people behave in unexpected ways. It's really hard to predict the reaction of the crowd these days. I have been deeply disappointed with the HN moderation in the past few months. At the very least, a "you should have known better" message should be delivered in private and not posted as conspicuously as this one.
- dang 6y ago
  I'm afraid I'm not really following most of your points here, but you may be right that my GP comment was excessive. It's always best to avoid shaming and easy to go too far.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]