11 ms·
Using the trademark is one thing. The authors brazen reaction another: https://github.com/notepad-plus-plus/notepad-plus-plus/issues/17982 https://github.com/no
by FinnKuhn 6mo ago
Using the trademark is one thing. The authors brazen reaction another: https://github.com/notepad-plus-plus/notepad-plus-plus/issues/17982 https://github.com/notepad-plus-plus/notepad-plus-plus/issue...
- 47282847 6mo agoTo me he sounds inexperienced/naive and a little scared (and thus “defensive”) but well-intentioned. His response makes me believe that he didn’t do it for fame, to deceive, or other selfish reasons.
- AureliusMA 6mo agoI don't believe that he is naive. It looks like he wants to use the Notepad++ brand authority to capture the notepad++ macos market (which is big!) Thus he is infringing on a trademark for his own benefit.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- Matl 6mo ago> capture the notepad++ macos market Is it big? Notepad++ is big in the Windows world but I am not certain that it is automatically big on Mac. They have much more Mac-native feeling editors like TextMate, Nova, Cot, even SublimeText feels more macOS-ishy than Notepad++ I am on Linux, Notepad++ is not a name of concern on here at all and if it ever came to Linux most people wouldn't notice. If you're in the Windows world that might seem like an improbability given how big it is there, but trust me, it's not a well known name anywhere else.
- lukan 6mo ago"I am on Linux, Notepad++ is not a name of concern on here at all and if it ever came to Linux most people wouldn't notice." Strong disagree. The thing I miss in linux most is notepad++ or something as capable and usable (open for suggestions, but chances are I already tried them)
- throwaway270925 6mo agoAny pointers on what exactly you miss compared to Linux alternatives like Kate, Sublime, VSCode, etc? (Assuming you already tried them)
- lukan 6mo agoSublime I like, but is proprietary (and there was something else). VScode is too heavy, kate as well. (But maybe with kate I just need to modify the key bindings so they match what I am used to, I only recently tried it out) Basically, I want code folding(with option to collapse all the tree), macrorecording, search (replace) in files, but with all the goodies notepadd++ provides, where I can easily set the folder to search, what filepatterns to exclude etc.
- 47282847 6mo agoZed?
- technothrasher 6mo agoNotepadqq is a decent crack at a Notepad++ clone for Linux, but it is no longer actively maintained.
- lukan 6mo agoThanks, I did not try out that one, though it being abandoned is of course not great.
- pjc50 6mo agoInteresting. I'd have thought that Linux users would go traditional (vi vs. Emacs) or for something heavier (vscode), or quick and easy for when you just need $EDITOR (nano).
- lukan 6mo agoFor some reasons I never liked vi nor emacs, vscode is indeed too heavy and nano too awkward. I use mostly xed, but it lacks compared to notepad++
- prepend 6mo agoIt’s probably a few thousand users. When I switched to mac, I looked for notepad++ and settled on BBEdit (which is awesome and funny I forgot about it all these years). This doesn’t seem like for money, but for esteem.
- shagie 6mo agoA shout out for BBEdit which is a 34 year old Mac native text editor that maintains a freemium license (and the free version is still quite featureful). It doesn’t suck.® I've maintained my copy of it from back in the MacOS 7.x days.
- f3408fh 6mo agoA malicious actor would be happy to be publicly labeled inexperienced/naive.
- doginasuit 6mo agoThat reasoning holds but it is not based on any of the facts at hand. There's a reason why any community worth being apart of has a tendency to assume good faith. People make mistakes. I respect Don Ho's response and I don't see how the pitchfork brigade is bringing anything valuable to the situation.
- f3408fh 6mo agoIf you’d actually installed it and realized afterward that you’d been misled, whether by someone who doesn’t understand trademarks or someone acting in bad faith, you’d probably feel differently. Leaving a comment on HN in that situation is a pretty reasonable reaction.
- lopis 6mo agoPeople are pissed because instead of taking the feedback, apologizing and acting immediately, he wrote comment after comment giving excuses. What he did is literally illegal, and ignorance or good intentions is not a solid excuse.
- i_think_so 6mo agoThis. A billion times this. The community should be shouting from the rooftops that there is an intruder in the neighborhood. Maybe there's no malice intended and this is just a colossal pile of honest mistakes. Maybe this author is as clueless as he appears. Maybe, but until he appears at the United Nations and doxes himself before embarking on a world wide apology tour, nobody in their right mind should install that binary. I wouldn't even run the build script in a sandbox.
- wartywhoa23 6mo agoThe inverse Hanlon's razor cuts much better than the original one these days: Never attribute to stupidity (incompetence|naivety) that which is adequately explained by malice.
- LeCompteSftware 6mo agoThe smarmy dishonesty about "expanding the Notepad++ brand" actually is selfish and ill-intentioned. Perhaps he is too young and naive to fully understand that he is being parasitic. But naivety is a well-travelled path towards malice. Regardless, he absolutely deserves to be shamed on GitHub for this. I don't like the online culture of public shame and sandbagging - I think this GitHub thread should be closed now that it's viral - but sometimes people actually do things they should be ashamed of. This needs to be a tough lesson.
- efilife 6mo agoI'm spamming this everywhere - taken from his blog: > I've shipped fintech and risk products at Moody's, BNY, AxiomSL, Amex and many more. I've built platforms, designed user experiences, assembled portfolio analytics and worked on professional services teams. Also' he's not young. Check his github avatar
- f3408fh 6mo agoIt sounds like BS. Guy’s done it all if you believe his resume.
- efilife 6mo agoThat's kinda the point. No matter if it's true or not, it puts him in bad light
- LeCompteSftware 6mo agoYou know, what's frustrating is that when I first contemptuously dismissed "Notepad++ for MacOS" as a trademark violation I did skim that stuff and accordingly just sort of assumed the port was technically legitimate, but disrespectful of copyright. But of course it was vibe-coded, and apparently chock full of stupid bugs that would have been caught with adequate manual testing. Why wouldn't I assume otherwise? This from his website is pretty funny: These days I'm deep in multi-agent AI and honestly it's changed everything. I build with both hands, one on the code, one on the vision. I can finally bring to life ideas I've been carrying around for years that always needed too many people and too many quarters. The first well-known software he vibe-coded is a buggy port of something a talented human spent many decades hand-crafting. The slop project is completely devoid of creativity or imagination, and it's going down in public flames because he was stupid about copyright. Kind of cartoonish, actually.
- pndy 6mo agoI don't wanna be rude but it looks like this guy just arrived on the Internet this year - around March-April and it doesn't seem like he has any prior activity. He just decided to roll this Notepad++ for macOS and that's it Also, his medium avatar looks awfully generated.
- RobotToaster 6mo agoIt reads to me like English isn't his first language. Either way the complexities of open source licensing are something a lot of people don't understand.
- koiueo 6mo ago[flagged]
- rotational 6mo ago[dead]
- RobotToaster 6mo agoThere's a term for making conclusions about someone based on their race.
- koiueo 6mo ago[flagged]
- harmonics 6mo agoNo, you're simply being a bigoted ass. I am not surprised that your comments are not dead, as it's been perfectly acceptable to insinuate various things about certain groups of people here, or even straight up write horrible things about them, based on nothing but their surface characteristics. As long as you're careful to avoid some "protected" groups, that is. Even the tired excuse of "I am just asking questions" is there, slightly modified. I consulted Jia Tan on his opinion of this situation, but he is yet to respond. In Mandarin Chinese, of course.
- cryptonym 6mo agoFirst step would be taking down the website, second step is an apology, third step is bringing back online with new branding and eventually a final word to thank them, share the link and say they remain open to criticism. It's not rocket science. Pretty sure even his LLM would give that strategy and implement it without burning too many tokens. More than inexperienced, either he really can't read a room or he knows very well what he is doing.
- lopis 6mo agoRight? Instead we get: - Saying he's hoping Don allows it - "I actually did nothing wrong" - "I actually did nothing wrong" part 2 - "I actually did nothing wrong" part 3 - Why are you so mad? Give me a week - Why are you so mad? I added more lies to the website - Why are you so mad? I'm working on it ... over the course of 2 days. Shutting down the website and pulling the app offline should have taken minutes.
- 47282847 6mo agoPeople react differently to feedback without necessarily bad intentions. Not everyone is ready to instantly admit mistakes. Empathy goes a long way.
- HumblyTossed 6mo agoReading the above, how much empathy does someone need to give before they can feel the other party has bad intentions? "No" needs to mean something.
- 47282847 6mo agoIt’s not either-or. You can tell people No and be empathetic to their reasons at the same time. Understanding doesn’t mean agreement or acceptance. It also doesn’t mean you excuse their behavior, or allow it to continue. Empathy doesn’t mean you like what they’re doing. That would be sympathy. In fact, understanding makes it easier to get people to do what you want. Some argue that it is even a precondition, to meet someone where they are, to get them to change their ways. The other remaining option is violence/force, which will not fundamentally change their behavior but only shift the problematic behavior elsewhere (and often make it worse).
- freehorse 6mo agoTo me it seems like a "idgaf" mentality, and trying to get as much and push as far as he can. Never in his replies he shows any sign of admitting that he should not have put the notepad++ name like this, that it looked like an actual endorsement and this was wrong. He just finally (after putting repeated pressure) accepts to change the branding. I don't understand why some people like him do that and how. I assume it is the "fake it till you make it" mentality, like "fake the endorsement until they actually endorse your project". Clearly doesn't work like this, but if this mentality has gotten you far, why not try it here too? You can be inexperienced and naive, and at the same time understand when you make a mistake. Being "inexperienced" because you actively refuse to learn from what people tell you that you do wrong is not inexperience anymore.
- wang_li 6mo agoWhat LLMs have brought to our industry is exposure of how many people in it are total pieces of shit. You have the hucksters who are out there trying to get you to invest in their LLM startup and they constantly use language that is functionally lying about what their product is by likening what it does to actual functioning human brains and personalities. You have the fantasists who see a grammatically correct sentence as proof of omnipotence and then run around telling everyone how AI has totally changed everything. You have the posers who use LLMs to cut-n-paste code from other's repos, directly and indirectly, and then claim they wrote it and pretend to have skills and abilities they don't have. Then you have the ignoramuses in media and such who know nothing, they hear all the hucksters and fantasists jibber-jabbing and proceed to flood the world with untrue stories about AI and it's affects on society.
- efilife 6mo ago> I've shipped fintech and risk products at Moody's, BNY, AxiomSL, Amex and many more. I've built platforms, designed user experiences, assembled portfolio analytics and worked on professional services teams. No inexperience here. It is malice
- sleepybrett 6mo agothats a lot of companies for a guy so young. Probably gets the boot a bunch.
- lukan 6mo agoHe was told by the original author to not use the name for his project 5 days ago. 3 days ago he wrote "Guys, all I wanted to do is to make Notepad++ available on mac and keep it open and free. I'm talking to Don. I really hope he will be ok with the name. It actually expands notepad++ brand to mac." Already ignoring the authors wishes. He said clearly it is not OK and wants the name changed. That's it - but he keeps ignoring it. I fail to see good intentions here.
- emaro 6mo agoYeah. And if you want to expand an existing brand that's not yours, you ask first, and only continue after a green light from the owner.
- lukan 6mo agoWell, that part might be temporarily excused by naivety. But he did ask, was not replied to - and he did it anyway. So I actually do not believe in naivety. And now it is past that point anyway.
- dylan604 6mo agoYou mean asking for forgiveness is easier than asking for permission is not a valid way to walk through life?
- lukan 6mo agoIn general really no, but I do see the point in not asking for permission for everything to get anything done. (I am german, here the saying is, anything not explicitely allowed is forbidden and there is no fun in this) But I hate the stance when people do it, when it is clear that no permission will be given. To establish facts on the ground so to say. (But there are exceptions where I think it is legit)
- koiueo 6mo agoJudging by the fork author's name, should've asked them in russian :-/
- whateverboat 6mo agoProduct manager in software for 10 years. I cannot believe the inexperienced defense.
- tsukurimashou 6mo agothe road to hell is paved with good intentions
- gilrain 6mo ago> His response makes me believe … I’d pay more attention to his behavior.
- koiueo 6mo agoNaive my ass. From the fork's authors page > Andrey Letov is a New York product leader and software engineer. And then a long list of professional achievements follows. He knows exactly what he's doing
- taco_emoji 6mo agoAll of his responses are moronic misreadings of NP++'s actual author's comments, which lead me to believe that he is acting entirely in bad faith.
- LeCompteSftware 6mo ago"I will give you one week to change the name." "No, I'm not going to do that." "Okay fine, I'll report you to Cloudflare now." "BROOOOOOOO you said you'd give me a week?!?!"
- ssl-3 6mo agoIt looks like it went more like this: "Stop using my trademark." [1] "OK, give me a couple of weeks. I was intending to expand your brand." [2] "No. I've reported this to your CDN." [3] --- [1]: This is the correct way to handle things. [2]: This has the appearance of being evidence of -deliberate- fuckery. [3]: This kind of action is the inevitable result of deliberate fuckery.
- as1mov 6mo agoFunny how the vibe-coding speed grinds to 0 the moment people catch on to their bullshit. A name change requires a week but shitting out 200 commits with Claude takes barely a month.
- ares623 6mo agoWe have found the limits of agentic engineering. Changing a logo on a website apparently takes weeks.
- f3408fh 6mo agoThe disclaimer he put up on the website is comical. "In coordination with [original author], I will be _evolving the brand_ to …"
- bayindirh 6mo agoSmells like AI slop past its expiration date, to be honest.
- pndy 6mo agoMaybe this is some weird attempt to see if malicious takeover with bots is possible
- xantronix 6mo agoGiven the way the guy who "ported" Notepad++ to macOS is behaving, it's hard to think of any actual altruistic reasons to do any of this. If Don Ho wanted to port Notepad++ to macOS with LLMs, he could have just as easily done it himself and arguably achieved a superior result. This whole endeavour on aletik's part seems like vanity at best and probably just a malware vector down the line regardless.
- 8cvor6j844qw_d6 6mo ago> malware vector down the line My concern is the ones that didn't get caught and are waiting to pull a Jia Tan.
- testfrequency 6mo agoI honestly chuckled reading this “in coordination” comment. Imagine being slapped across the face, and instead of saying you were slapped, you say…”in coordination with the back of their left hand”. This entire thread actually makes me so angry for the N++ team. He was being so kind in his wording and was clearly being taken advantage of. “I’m in NYC you have my WhatsApp” wtf does that even mean…you eat chopped cheese and have a cell phone?
- 6mo ago
- pjc50 6mo agoAI means never having to ask permission. Or forgiveness, it seems.
- 2ndorderthought 6mo agoSee all you do is take the repo and put it into the AI and then ask the AI to regenerate it to another directory. Et Voila the AI generated it and the person didn't do anything illegal. Okay that might not be okay. So you take screen shots, release notes and feed that to the AI. Now it's fine. Even better is if you can get the data trained into the model! Because then it's totally different right? 1 shotting companies is the future and that's why so many companies are accelerating ai by giving all their code and plans to the leading ai providers for money.
- wartywhoa23 6mo agoAsking? Inessential!
- bartread 6mo ago> I wanted is to bring Notepad++ to mac and allow people to find Mac version of Notepad++ quickly and use it. Seems he’s ignorant of the ecosystem too (or possibly disingenuous, or maybe doesn’t realise he’s done something wrong or why). Notepad++ runs perfectly on macOS under Wine. I’ve been using it that way for two or three years now. Wasn’t a struggle to set up either: I simply ran the installer as if I was running Windows and then it #justworked.
- paulnpace 6mo agoIndeed, and in general. Popular, well supported open source project around for decades not available in POSIX, somehow? In Linux, the only things I don't have with Wine are whatever the other clipboard is that highlighting text gets filled with and access to network shares. Such nothingburgers that I've never spent real time to figure out if there's a solution.
- bartread 6mo agoI've never managed to get MS Office running successfully on Wine, at least not any recent version of it anyway. That might work fine on Linux but it doesn't get past the first handful of pages of the installer on macOS. It's not the end of the world, but the Windows version of Excel is streets ahead of the macOS version, which is why I was keen to make it work. Otherwise, everything I really care about from Windows - the odd utility, along with retro computing emulators - seems to run fine on Wine. I haven't got into more modern games so can't speak to how well they tend to run.
- paulnpace 6mo agoMS Office is not an open source project. When someone has an issue getting something like Notepad++ running with Wine, they have the option to inform the Notepad++ project or if they possess the skills, submit a change so that Notepad++ will run smoothly on Wine. Or, inform Wine and they may figure out how to fix the issue within Wine. I haven't bothered getting Office running on Linux in a very long time. The only thing I miss is a convenient way to print envelopes, as LibreOffice is incapable of doing this. However, I mail far less than I used to so I just hand write the addresses. I think the only real way to run Office is on Windows in VirtualBox, which I still haven't had any need to bother with.
- doginasuit 6mo agoThat response doesn't seem brazen. It sounds like they had a deeply mistaken understanding of what an open source license grants and believed it would be fine to use the name and branding as well as the code. Unless I missed it, it sounds like they are changing how their site communicates its relationship to the original source. What I find baffling about that conversation are the people having their LLMs weigh in on what the author should have done. Verbal takedown by LLM is a new level of cringe. Edit: There are some replies I hadn't seen, their confusion and request for patience sounds like they still don't fully appreciate their mistake.
- Semaphor 6mo agoIt sounds brazen and incredibly entitled. The LLM response seems fitting for a vibe coded project with a vibe brain author.
- nerdjon 6mo agoI am on the fence about using an LLM to respond to situations like this, particularly if it is a screenshot and it is obvious what they are doing. It is snarky and cringe, but also goes to show how poorly the decision making is by the author that even an LLM is pointing out how badly you are handling this. Especially when this is clearly a vibe coded project.
- efilife 6mo agoOh what the hell. This is the vibe coder mentality. Grift, as far as it goes
- RobotToaster 6mo ago[flagged]
- roncesvalles 6mo agoYeah it's pretty clear that he's well-intentioned. There are plenty of ports of open source projects literally named "port of <trademarked name>" and generally the original authors don't mind. what even is the point of open source if you can't do that? If I fork a repo on GitHub and the name of the project is trademarked, have I committed trademark violation? In this case he just went a little too far by cloning the whole website. Even then tbh I still take his side because it's in the spirit of the Wild West Internet culture to have done something like this.
- mg794613 6mo agoWow, have you seen his resumé? There is no language or culture barrier here. This guy knows exactly what he's doing. We'll wait while you check it out :D
- kube-system 6mo ago> If I fork a repo on GitHub and the name of the project is trademarked, have I committed trademark violation? If you purport that you are that project, then yes. Trademark is a consumer protection law that protects people from misrepresentation -- when you buy a Coca Cola you know it is the Coca Cola. If there is any confusion that [x] software port is from the same original author of [x], it is trademark infringement. > what even is the point of open source if you can't do that? Open source is about sharing the code itself -- it is not about misrepresenting who wrote it. There is a very clear line between the two.
- NicuCalcea 6mo agoI think the reasonable response would be to take the website down and make the repo private while they change the name.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- rpigab 6mo agoThis reaction is normal, aletik could have been the next Jia Tan, for all we know, and could have distributed "fake notepad++ for Mac" binaries with backdoors in them to thousand of Mac users who think it is an officially n++-endorsed project when it is not, created by someone who is unknown. Aletik can fork n++ and find a name for it, but can't use the brand and logo, and should be stopped by all means necessary if he does not comply ASAP. Tech bloggers should know better than to promote this without checking.
- PythagoRascal 6mo ago"The author" in above comment refers to the author of the port. So, yes, thats what they meant.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- doginasuit 6mo ago> Tech bloggers should know better than to promote this without checking. Agreed, and it also seems unlikely this will be their takeaway. They now get to report on the drama which will probably get more clicks.
- stackghost 6mo ago>Tech bloggers should know better than to promote this without checking. Tech bloggers are just LLMs these days
- tardedmeme 6mo agoIf you compiled notepad++ for Mac how should you make it available on the internet so people with Macs can download notepad++? Don't tell me you have to call it something else because that's absolutely insane, even if the law agrees.
- koiueo 6mo ago> If you compiled notepad++ for Mac That's not what happened: - there's a lot of UI code, so it's not a mere distribution for Mac, not even sure it qualifies as a port at this point - also, the authors page states Letov as the first author It's in fact a fork. And unless the original author is ok with that, you shouldn't advertise your fork under the original name.
- throwaway2037 6mo ago> The authors brazen reaction another I want to clarify. Are you implying that Don Ho (donho) or Andrey Letov (aletik) is having the "brazen reaction"? From your link, I found aletik's first comment here: https://github.com/notepad-plus-plus/notepad-plus-plus/issues/17982#issuecomment-4360074332 https://github.com/notepad-plus-plus/notepad-plus-plus/issue... When I first read about the MacOS port from HN, I also assumed it was blessed by Don Ho. I was fooled by the new website. Now that I know it was not coordinated, it looks weird (even creepy/uncanny valley'ish) in hindsight, especially using all the same icons and branding, and including Don Ho on the author page.
- mg794613 6mo agoThe brazen part is Andrey Letov pretending to not understand.
- _0xdd 6mo agoWhat's amazing to me is how I was downvoted into oblivion on a few different subreddits and forums for expressing concern about the vibe-coded nature of the project and that the author of the Mac port appeared to be using the Notepad++ name/branding without any official blessing from the project.
- donkers 6mo agoThere's a lot of people even in here who don't seem to get it, who call it a "simple" task to do the port and are confused why this is a bad thing at all. A lot of people in the industry (and perhaps everywhere) have a hard time with ethics and doing the right thing.
- infecto 6mo agoIn case anyone else was confused. The author of this fork replied to some trademark discussion with a “fuck trademarks” response. He edited/deleted it but you can still see it in some of the quoted replies. Fork author is either a young kid or clueless.
- altairprime 6mo agoOr a tech founder (gestures at Ubercab)
- Cieric 6mo agoThe only place I see that is from a user "LiEnby" not "aletik", and none of aletik's existing messages are edited. All replies I see with the message are also to LiEnby. I don't agree with aletik's slow response in any way, but I don't think your claim is correct either. Do you have anything to prove that this was said by aletik?
- infecto 6mo agoIf that’s the case good catch. I had the whole conversation unhidden and it was riddled with odd quotes. My bad for the misrepresentation. My conclusion still holds, fork author is a fool and is playing the slow game for no reason.
- Cieric 6mo agoAll good, and agreed the fork author is in the wrong here. I just like keeping the facts straight since that can inform better arguments and discussions.
- efilife 6mo agoIt was not him as far as I can tell. It was this guy: https://github.com/nukeop https://github.com/nukeop that showed examples of the trademark law being stupid sometimes, and this guy: https://github.com/LiEnby https://github.com/LiEnby that said "fuck trademarks" The author of the "rewrite" didn't seem to say this