The dirty secret of prototip2 (javascript tooltip) | Hacker News Reader

The dirty secret of prototip2 (javascript tooltip)

craigsworks.com

56 pointsmoe17 comments

See the (short) e-mail exchange for a sad little story; http://craigsworks.com/projects/simpletip/sandbox/emails.txt

I don't know either of these people, but Nick clearly has no concept of how copyright actually works. The "result" of code is inherently a process, which isn't copyrightable. Only his verbatim source code is copyrightable.

The entire concept of reverse engineering rests on this distinction.

Wow, that's incredibly lame on Nick's part. If the API is the same, but the underlying code is completely different then that it not a 'port', or a derivative, that is a different product.

That's like saying a Macbook and a Viao both have a screen, keyboard and USB ports and so they're the same thing for licensing purposes... Unlikely.

Oh wow. If you mention Simpletip in the contact form on Nick's site you get redirected to here: http://getafckinlife.ytmnd.com/

Classy stuff.

(nick's site: http://www.nickstakenburg.com/)

EDIT: I can't seem to get it to happen again.

EDIT2: It was his site. http://i50.tinypic.com/166nh4z.jpg

Worked for me - perhaps because I capitalised it as SimpleTip. Here's the message I sent him :>

    Interesting that you gave Craig Thompson such a hard time over SimpleTip, 
    while having NO IDEA about how copyright works when applied to code.

    Absolutely right about reputation, btw. If you want to be taken seriously
    you should realize that showing your ability to be a pompous blowhard 
    is the worst kind of advertising you can have for yourself.

Nick's acting like a dick.

Craig, please continue to distribute Simpletip. I see that you seem to know more about the licensing issues than Nick.

[deleted]

Edit: Removed my comment when I realized this story is over 1 year old...

just realized simpletip was put back online...

http://craigsworks.com/projects/simpletip/

i wonder why the sandbox page was left up.

Also:

- those letters were in jan/2009

- there is now a project called qTip

- Nick is in the Netherlands, Craig is in the USA <- hard to sue someone in another country

- ProTip is still at version 2, apparently Nick never got around to doing v3

I was using qTip with jQuery on the desktop and in an iPhone-specific site. It was a pleasure to use.

See the (short) e-mail exchange for a sad little story; http://craigsworks.com/projects/simpletip/sandbox/emails.txt

This is totally absurd. jhickner is right. Nick doesn't know /anything/ about copyright or licensing. I wonder how obviously dumb something needs to be before you don't have to pay a lot for a lawyer.

I also wonder if the Something Awful style defense would have stopped this. Leonard J. Crabs can be pretty convincing.

http://craigsworks.com/projects/simpletip/

It seems he moved on and cut his losses.

I didn't realize qTip was the successor to simpleTip. I've been using it in all my projects, and find it much better than protoTip (especially since it runs in jquery, and is free)

And qtip2 is coming soon :-)

Having been involved in litigation over copyright where we were 100% in the right but the other side had fundamental misconceptions about how copyright actually works I can understand why you'd just give up when threatened with legal action.

It took us a long time (about six months) and a considerable chunk of money in lawyers fees just to get them to go away - even though their case was totally groundless.

Nice! I've been looking for a good tooltip library to use in my project. I wouldn't have known about this otherwise. Thanks Nick!

Free the software!

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