4 ms·

I agree, but that doesn't make it not bad taste, and by the same token, it's not against the MIT license to attempt to block (albeit trivially) companies from t

by agg23 3y ago

I agree, but that doesn't make it not bad taste, and by the same token, it's not against the MIT license to attempt to block (albeit trivially) companies from trying to do that.

madeofpalk 3y ago
The only bad taste thing that's happened, imho, was a (commercial?) project for self hosting calling themselves 'sorry cypress'. I wouldn't be surprised if there's legitimate trademark issues here. But Cypress volunteered their work product under the MIT licenses which very clearly states what you can and can't do with it. We cannot hold others to this additional arbitary standard that you coward behind. The 'obvious' thing that will happen if you open source your software that someone else may use it to compete against you. Duh! Cypress is trying to have their cake and eat it too. Zero sympathy for them here.
- agg23 3y ago
  I want to make it very clear that I do agree with you. However, by the exact reasoning that allows companies to replicate, Cypress can try to block, however stupid that may be. It's no more wrong, because both things are allowable under the license, it's just how we look at the situation and what we consider to be "morally acceptable" rather than what is actually required.
  - yencabulator 3y ago
    If Playwright et al didn't exist, that might lead to an "OpenCypress" fork... but given that alternatives exist, this sounds like Cypress is going to die a lonely death, trying to pump as much money as possible out of Enterprise sales before it is forgotten.
- _JessicaSachs 3y ago
  The legit trademark issue is https://npmjs.com/package/cypress-cloud https://npmjs.com/package/cypress-cloud (package owned by the Sorry Cypress dude) and then the OP article above links to a bunch of packages that seem to be from disparate owners, but are actually all the same guy OR come from code originally written by that guy and _THEN_ forked (Deploy Sentinel). The dude also has some pretty nice namesquatted packages (cypress-vscode, cypress-debug) that he references in that article. It made me think that there was serious anti-competitive energy in there and that made me worry for the community. I rolled back the tweet because it was getting too much traction... and I lost trust in the article once it seemed to be a personal thing that Cy was responding to with radio silence and legalese. Once I realized the article was misleading, I deleted the tweets that drove the traffic to HN today.
  - agoldis 3y ago
    Thanks for sharing your concerns, Jessica, we tried to be fully transparent and share our findings with the interested audience. I have added a disclaimer that explicitly mentions the owners of the packages to avoid confusion. - The article clearly states what entities are affected - Currents, Sorry Cypress and Deploy Sentinel; it doesn't claim those are random package authors. - Not all the listed packages are written by the dude or written and _THEN_ forked, we provided a detailed breakdown of each package origin. For example, @deploysentinel/cypress-debugger is a completely standalone, innovative software released more than a year before Cypress Test Replay and cypress-debugger - The article lists all the blocked packages we were able to discover. We published the full list to be totally transparent. Obviously, we create and work on cypress-related packages - e.g. a vscode extension for cypress. There was also a rename from Cypress Dashboard to Cypress Cloud. NPM lists ~1.6K packages with "cypress-" prefix. Another example: we ran a survey on a community Slack channel with ~500 members to pick a name for cypress-debugger - the options were: cypress-debugger, cypress-debug, cypress-tracer; cypress-debugger won. An interesting experiment would be to rename those packages. Do you believe they will be unblocked?

by agg23 3y ago

I agree, but that doesn't make it not bad taste, and by the same token, it's not against the MIT license to attempt to block (albeit trivially) companies from trying to do that.

madeofpalk 3y ago

The only bad taste thing that's happened, imho, was a (commercial?) project for self hosting calling themselves 'sorry cypress'. I wouldn't be surprised if there's legitimate trademark issues here. But Cypress volunteered their work product under the MIT licenses which very clearly states what you can and can't do with it. We cannot hold others to this additional arbitary standard that you coward behind. The 'obvious' thing that will happen if you open source your software that someone else may use it to compete against you. Duh! Cypress is trying to have their cake and eat it too. Zero sympathy for them here.

agg23 3y ago
I want to make it very clear that I do agree with you. However, by the exact reasoning that allows companies to replicate, Cypress can try to block, however stupid that may be. It's no more wrong, because both things are allowable under the license, it's just how we look at the situation and what we consider to be "morally acceptable" rather than what is actually required.
- yencabulator 3y ago
  If Playwright et al didn't exist, that might lead to an "OpenCypress" fork... but given that alternatives exist, this sounds like Cypress is going to die a lonely death, trying to pump as much money as possible out of Enterprise sales before it is forgotten.
_JessicaSachs 3y ago
The legit trademark issue is https://npmjs.com/package/cypress-cloud https://npmjs.com/package/cypress-cloud (package owned by the Sorry Cypress dude) and then the OP article above links to a bunch of packages that seem to be from disparate owners, but are actually all the same guy OR come from code originally written by that guy and _THEN_ forked (Deploy Sentinel). The dude also has some pretty nice namesquatted packages (cypress-vscode, cypress-debug) that he references in that article. It made me think that there was serious anti-competitive energy in there and that made me worry for the community. I rolled back the tweet because it was getting too much traction... and I lost trust in the article once it seemed to be a personal thing that Cy was responding to with radio silence and legalese. Once I realized the article was misleading, I deleted the tweets that drove the traffic to HN today.
- agoldis 3y ago
  Thanks for sharing your concerns, Jessica, we tried to be fully transparent and share our findings with the interested audience. I have added a disclaimer that explicitly mentions the owners of the packages to avoid confusion. - The article clearly states what entities are affected - Currents, Sorry Cypress and Deploy Sentinel; it doesn't claim those are random package authors. - Not all the listed packages are written by the dude or written and _THEN_ forked, we provided a detailed breakdown of each package origin. For example, @deploysentinel/cypress-debugger is a completely standalone, innovative software released more than a year before Cypress Test Replay and cypress-debugger - The article lists all the blocked packages we were able to discover. We published the full list to be totally transparent. Obviously, we create and work on cypress-related packages - e.g. a vscode extension for cypress. There was also a rename from Cypress Dashboard to Cypress Cloud. NPM lists ~1.6K packages with "cypress-" prefix. Another example: we ran a survey on a community Slack channel with ~500 members to pick a name for cypress-debugger - the options were: cypress-debugger, cypress-debug, cypress-tracer; cypress-debugger won. An interesting experiment would be to rename those packages. Do you believe they will be unblocked?