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I am the maintainer of a library called "pdf2image" on GitHub, I've been maintaining it for well over 3 years now. At some point in the past a few other project

by belval 6y ago

I am the maintainer of a library called "pdf2image" on GitHub, I've been maintaining it for well over 3 years now. At some point in the past a few other projects with the same name appeared for different languages. I didn't go on a long rant on HN about how other people where taking my "IP" because it's a generic name. On top of that, GitHub Actions have been up since November 2019 and as such, OP had around 11 months to register his project. The name being generic it's only expected that someone ended up taking it. Now the only thing that makes people all up in arms is that FB is the employer of the dev that did this. Since we all hate Facebook, we support the underdog in this. Repost the exact same post while removing the name of the company and it would not even be close to trending.

dilyevsky 6y ago
Good for you then. Perhaps original author was using it as their portfolio project and now has to explain that no he didn’t steal it from fb - they did. Don’t assume what works for you is acceptable to everyone.
- belval 6y ago
  Except the FB project is a complete rewrite, done by one of their employee. There is no "stealing" here. You wouldn't tell someone who wrote a link bit.ly clone that he "stole" the idea from the original website. Even if they had copy and pasted OP's code (which they didn't), it's MIT-licensed and only minimal restrictions apply. There are things that are wrong with how these big corporation operate, but this is not one of them. This is more akin to a small shop called "Play Store" not registering a domain name and then making a post on HN when Google registers it for Android.
  - dilyevsky 6y ago
    Yes it is more of “Abibas” knockoffs you can by somewhere in asia/middle east except you know that fact that it’s trillion dollar corporation doing it
  - mafuy 6y ago
    You have to differentiate between a rewrite with vs without looking at the original. A clean room rewrite is generally accepted (i.e. derive spec from original, then have the spec implemented by someone who does not know the original). Looking at the source while writing some kind of copy of it is a violation (legal and ethical). As per the thread there, the FB person did indeed see the original.
    - belval 6y ago
      In this case the code is licensed under MIT so I really fail to see what you mean by a legal or moral violation. There is a subset of the open source community that seems to default to the MIT license and then act surprised when their project is used in a way that is not what they had in mind.

by belval 6y ago

dilyevsky 6y ago

Good for you then. Perhaps original author was using it as their portfolio project and now has to explain that no he didn’t steal it from fb - they did. Don’t assume what works for you is acceptable to everyone.

belval 6y ago
Except the FB project is a complete rewrite, done by one of their employee. There is no "stealing" here. You wouldn't tell someone who wrote a link bit.ly clone that he "stole" the idea from the original website. Even if they had copy and pasted OP's code (which they didn't), it's MIT-licensed and only minimal restrictions apply. There are things that are wrong with how these big corporation operate, but this is not one of them. This is more akin to a small shop called "Play Store" not registering a domain name and then making a post on HN when Google registers it for Android.
- dilyevsky 6y ago
  Yes it is more of “Abibas” knockoffs you can by somewhere in asia/middle east except you know that fact that it’s trillion dollar corporation doing it
- mafuy 6y ago
  You have to differentiate between a rewrite with vs without looking at the original. A clean room rewrite is generally accepted (i.e. derive spec from original, then have the spec implemented by someone who does not know the original). Looking at the source while writing some kind of copy of it is a violation (legal and ethical). As per the thread there, the FB person did indeed see the original.
  - belval 6y ago
    In this case the code is licensed under MIT so I really fail to see what you mean by a legal or moral violation. There is a subset of the open source community that seems to default to the MIT license and then act surprised when their project is used in a way that is not what they had in mind.