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Comment by saradhi | Hacker News Reader

William, the intention of "TabulaPro" is to give the developers a chance to use a single library instead of switching ExtractTable for images and tabula-py for text PDFs.

What do you recommend us to do, to not make you feel we made a dick move.

TIA

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Well, let me ask a few questions:

Did you ask permission of the original author to use a derived name?

Did you discuss your plan to commercialize the original author's work with the author? Before starting out?

Since starting a commercial project, how much money have you given to the original author?

Author here.

1) No. 2) No. 3) Zero.

- No, No, Zero.

"commercialize the original author's work with the author" - No, but let me highlight this, any extraction with tabula-py is not commercialized - you can look into the wrapper too :) or even compare the results with tabula-py vs tabulaPro.

Copying the TabulaPro description here, "TabulaPro is a layer on tabula-py library to extract tables from Scan PDFs and Images." - we respect every effort of the contributors & author, never intended to plagiarize.

I understand the misinterpretation here is that we are charging for the open-sourced library because of the name. We already informed author in the email about unpublishing the library, this morning, I just deleted the project and came here to mention it is deleted :)

Sorry, Saradhi, I don't think you can reasonably claim there was no intention to plagiarize. Adding a "pro" to something is clearly meant to suggest it's the paid version of something. And it's equally clear that "TabulaPro" is derived from "Tabula".

It may be that you didn't realize that people would see your appropriation as wrong, although I have a hard time believing that as well given that the author tried to contact you and was ignored. As they say, "The wicked flee when no man pursueth."

So what I see here is somebody knowingly doing something dodgy and then panicking when getting caught. If you'd really like to make amends, I'd start with some serious introspection on what you actually did, and an honest conversation with the original author that hopefully includes a proper [1] apology.

[1] Meaning it includes an explicit recognition of your error and the harms done, a clear expression of regret, and a sincere offer to make amends. E.g., https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/the_three_part...

And I'm going add it's really weird that your answer ("No, No, Zero") is exactly the same as what the library author said [1] two hours before you posted. But you do that again without acknowledging the author, and with just enough format difference that it's not a copy-paste. It's extremely hard for me to imagine you didn't read what he said before writing that; it's just too similar.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22483334

I understand how the whole thing interpreted as, and I agree with you. I'll do a note as suggested. Thanks for guiding and the link too.

I would like to get the author's comment on "tried to contact you and was ignored", as I was the one who emailed yesterday.

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