4 ms·

Another creator gone off the deep end apparently? > reading the review responses by the creator, I don't really trust it anymore. Being rude to others who are

Another creator gone off the deep end apparently? > reading the review responses by the creator, I don't really trust it anymore. Being rude to others who are concerned over the recent move to closed-source (and without warning!) is pretty disheartening. > So, uh, the guy who made the VS Code Material Theme is threatening everyone who uses it in their products. He seems to have forgotten it was originally licensed under the Apache License, 2.0.. He wiped the commit history to make it look like it was always his weird fake license. Real messy. It’s always shocking to me how little people realize - or care - how their behavior - especially their treatment of others reflects on them.

tag2103 2y ago
Question bouncing around in my mind reading this, especially with money involved, is why did this not cross the line into criminal fraud?
- joshka 2y ago
  Because noone has stated an injury and made a complaint about it. It's likely that there's some copyright infringement going on with the current state of the repo (due to lack of the author's adherence to the requirements of the license). That could be subject to a DMCA notice if any of the previous contributors decided to make one.
- gosub100 2y ago
  Conspiracy would be more appropriate, no? Thing is, when you conspire to attack a corporation, you have FBI agents bending over backwards for you and your precious profits. When you conspire to attack a bunch or normal people, you're lucky if anyone does anything at all.
ryandrake 2y ago
So many people who are otherwise functional in society, for whatever reason just can't play well with others when it comes to online communication. This can be true for both software maintainers and users. People can't just leave their emotions at the door and file a bug report or respond to a help request, without including a little personal jab or passive aggressive snipe. Looking at some of those replies to users, it looks like this guy just couldn't keep himself from including those unnecessary little put downs.
- tuesdaynight 2y ago
  People say that the most part of communication is nonverbal. If that's true, written communication would be heavily impaired by the lacking of all the visual cues that we use to interpret someone's words. I tend to agree with them, but that's just my personal experience.
  - kstrauser 2y ago
    Written text is perfectly capable of communicating all that, as evidenced by zillions of poems, novels, essays, screenplays, etc. No, I counter that the real problem is that some people are either incredibly bad at communicating their real intent, or incredibly good at communicating their inner asshole nature.
- JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y ago
  It’s off topic but I don’t believe most people are functional in society. I think they are hiding their shitty behavior to themselves and to others, and their true self comes out once in a while. They hide it mostly to their family, but other human beings are treated like NPCs. For example I live in the south of France and people are literally crazy on the road but they still avoid accidents by some kind of miracle. These are people from all sex, color, and age. The good middle-aged white father becomes a fucking moron when his car is turned on. The young new mom who pretends to love her children is speeding on the road like an idiot. Society accepts that or turns its head the other way not to look at it, but it’s definitely around us and I see it every time I go to work.
  - toast0 2y ago
    > The young new mom who pretends to love her children is speeding on the road like an idiot. If everyone is crazy on the road, it's best to reduce the exposure to the road. Speeding decreases time spent on the road. Speeding on the road is genius, not stupid.
    - wizzwizz4 2y ago
badrequest 2y ago
It seems utterly absurd to me that anybody should be able to issue a copyright claim on a collection of colors and fonts. Copyrights are issued to logos and slogans, not design systems.
- lelandfe 2y ago
  If you think that sucks, check out T Mobile trademarking magenta https://www.npr.org/2019/11/25/782723429/t-mobiles-parent-tells-small-firm-to-keep-its-hands-off-magenta https://www.npr.org/2019/11/25/782723429/t-mobiles-parent-te...
  - scubadude 2y ago
    Cadbury and purple... These colours are their trademarks but I believe they don't own the colour in all domains.. probably just food? If you wanted to make a car company logo that colour you'd be ok?
- spudlyo 2y ago
  It seems utterly absurd to me we litigate the ownership of ideas or their expressions, but here we are. The founder of Bikram Yoga, tried to copyright a sequence of yoga poses, even though similar sequences have existed for for thousands of years. Monster, the energy drink maker, went after business for using the word "monster" in totally unrelated contexts. Disney trademarked "Hakuna Matata" (a Swahili phrase roughly equivalent to "no worries") after using it in The Lion King, prohibiting African businesses from using a common idiom in their own damn language. Don't get me started on Happy Fucking Birthday.
- School-Cotton 2y ago
  No, trademarks are issued to logos and slogans.
  - kelnos 2y ago
    Yes, but many logos are also copyrightable.
xeonmc 2y ago
The old commit history can still be accessed here: https://github.com/material-theme/vsc-material-theme/activity https://github.com/material-theme/vsc-material-theme/activit...
- joshka 2y ago
  This doesn't capture all of it though. There's also a bunch more that you can access by looking at commits in the Pull Requests.
  - xeonmc 2y ago
    It does, you just needs to find the last one before force push and click “browse repository at this point” and it will slow the pre force push history
    - joshka 2y ago
      Feel free to check for yourself, but the commits where the repo is licensed as MIT are not reachable from that UI - only the commits where the repo is licensed as Apache 2.0 (and the later self- created license). The earliest available activity entry is from 2023, which bottoms out at an initial commit from 2017. The code base is actually older than that having been started in 2015. The commits which have the real unadulterated history of the theme are available by taking the same actions on the PRs (browse repo), as they point at commits in other repos where that history has not been erased not the main repo where it has. I suspect this probably indicates that the GitHub repo was recreated in 2023 with a modified version of the source with the Apache license and a history that was rewritten to not contain the commits where the license was MIT. This aligns with what people are saying about the historical perspective on this.
      - joshka 2y ago
        https://github.com/material-theme/vsc-material-theme/commit/e98b4029ee5d09f5261fa1961cb0e3129a7eb8cf https://github.com/material-theme/vsc-material-theme/commit/... is the initial MIT licensed commit

tag2103 2y ago

Question bouncing around in my mind reading this, especially with money involved, is why did this not cross the line into criminal fraud?

joshka 2y ago
Because noone has stated an injury and made a complaint about it. It's likely that there's some copyright infringement going on with the current state of the repo (due to lack of the author's adherence to the requirements of the license). That could be subject to a DMCA notice if any of the previous contributors decided to make one.
gosub100 2y ago
Conspiracy would be more appropriate, no? Thing is, when you conspire to attack a corporation, you have FBI agents bending over backwards for you and your precious profits. When you conspire to attack a bunch or normal people, you're lucky if anyone does anything at all.

ryandrake 2y ago

So many people who are otherwise functional in society, for whatever reason just can't play well with others when it comes to online communication. This can be true for both software maintainers and users. People can't just leave their emotions at the door and file a bug report or respond to a help request, without including a little personal jab or passive aggressive snipe. Looking at some of those replies to users, it looks like this guy just couldn't keep himself from including those unnecessary little put downs.

tuesdaynight 2y ago
People say that the most part of communication is nonverbal. If that's true, written communication would be heavily impaired by the lacking of all the visual cues that we use to interpret someone's words. I tend to agree with them, but that's just my personal experience.
- kstrauser 2y ago
  Written text is perfectly capable of communicating all that, as evidenced by zillions of poems, novels, essays, screenplays, etc. No, I counter that the real problem is that some people are either incredibly bad at communicating their real intent, or incredibly good at communicating their inner asshole nature.
JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y ago
It’s off topic but I don’t believe most people are functional in society. I think they are hiding their shitty behavior to themselves and to others, and their true self comes out once in a while. They hide it mostly to their family, but other human beings are treated like NPCs. For example I live in the south of France and people are literally crazy on the road but they still avoid accidents by some kind of miracle. These are people from all sex, color, and age. The good middle-aged white father becomes a fucking moron when his car is turned on. The young new mom who pretends to love her children is speeding on the road like an idiot. Society accepts that or turns its head the other way not to look at it, but it’s definitely around us and I see it every time I go to work.
- toast0 2y ago
  > The young new mom who pretends to love her children is speeding on the road like an idiot. If everyone is crazy on the road, it's best to reduce the exposure to the road. Speeding decreases time spent on the road. Speeding on the road is genius, not stupid.
  - wizzwizz4 2y ago

badrequest 2y ago

It seems utterly absurd to me that anybody should be able to issue a copyright claim on a collection of colors and fonts. Copyrights are issued to logos and slogans, not design systems.

lelandfe 2y ago
If you think that sucks, check out T Mobile trademarking magenta https://www.npr.org/2019/11/25/782723429/t-mobiles-parent-tells-small-firm-to-keep-its-hands-off-magenta https://www.npr.org/2019/11/25/782723429/t-mobiles-parent-te...
- scubadude 2y ago
  Cadbury and purple... These colours are their trademarks but I believe they don't own the colour in all domains.. probably just food? If you wanted to make a car company logo that colour you'd be ok?
spudlyo 2y ago
It seems utterly absurd to me we litigate the ownership of ideas or their expressions, but here we are. The founder of Bikram Yoga, tried to copyright a sequence of yoga poses, even though similar sequences have existed for for thousands of years. Monster, the energy drink maker, went after business for using the word "monster" in totally unrelated contexts. Disney trademarked "Hakuna Matata" (a Swahili phrase roughly equivalent to "no worries") after using it in The Lion King, prohibiting African businesses from using a common idiom in their own damn language. Don't get me started on Happy Fucking Birthday.
School-Cotton 2y ago
No, trademarks are issued to logos and slogans.
- kelnos 2y ago
  Yes, but many logos are also copyrightable.

xeonmc 2y ago

The old commit history can still be accessed here: https://github.com/material-theme/vsc-material-theme/activity https://github.com/material-theme/vsc-material-theme/activit...

joshka 2y ago
This doesn't capture all of it though. There's also a bunch more that you can access by looking at commits in the Pull Requests.
- xeonmc 2y ago
  It does, you just needs to find the last one before force push and click “browse repository at this point” and it will slow the pre force push history
  - joshka 2y ago
    Feel free to check for yourself, but the commits where the repo is licensed as MIT are not reachable from that UI - only the commits where the repo is licensed as Apache 2.0 (and the later self- created license). The earliest available activity entry is from 2023, which bottoms out at an initial commit from 2017. The code base is actually older than that having been started in 2015. The commits which have the real unadulterated history of the theme are available by taking the same actions on the PRs (browse repo), as they point at commits in other repos where that history has not been erased not the main repo where it has. I suspect this probably indicates that the GitHub repo was recreated in 2023 with a modified version of the source with the Apache license and a history that was rewritten to not contain the commits where the license was MIT. This aligns with what people are saying about the historical perspective on this.
    - joshka 2y ago
      https://github.com/material-theme/vsc-material-theme/commit/e98b4029ee5d09f5261fa1961cb0e3129a7eb8cf https://github.com/material-theme/vsc-material-theme/commit/... is the initial MIT licensed commit