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> HNers please! Don't fill the issue with any more comments as it's likely to be locked and not really achieve anything more than that (specifically looking at you " dsignr")

I don't think that's fair. If you didn't want to stoke internet drama, the thing to do would have been not to submit it to HN in the first place. Having submitted it, it's unsporting to put the onus on others to de-escalate, and singling out a particular user feels particularly distasteful.

Edit: also, comments like these stoke further escalation:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25103613

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25103873

Please don't use HN for this, and please don't target people personally. That's leaving the path of curious conversation: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> If you didn't want to stoke internet drama, the thing to do would have been not to submit it to HN in the first place

One of the most important phenomena in tech, especially at the large-scale system (technical) & open source (social) levels, is emergent behavior: your complex system will likely react in ways you'd never expect. The HN guidelines keep this in mind and are designed to inspire curiosity and humility.

However, the quoted moderator narrative appears to pin the blame on the OP; there's a non-zero affect of "you should have know better."

Should he? A ton of posts like these get squashed or ignored, some much less thoughtful ones get celebrated, and the attitude towards big companies like Facebook or Google has changed over the years. COVID has additionally made people behave in unexpected ways. It's really hard to predict the reaction of the crowd these days.

I have been deeply disappointed with the HN moderation in the past few months. At the very least, a "you should have known better" message should be delivered in private and not posted as conspicuously as this one.

I'm afraid I'm not really following most of your points here, but you may be right that my GP comment was excessive. It's always best to avoid shaming and easy to go too far.

Devils advocate here:

"label-actions" is a name straight from the github nomenclature, and a (very) quick look at the code and syntax suggests this isn't a fork.

I could totally believe the inspiration came from the older project, but I could also believe it didn't, and I'm not so sure the OP should own the name.

This thread has more information: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25100810

Short answer, it was copied from author then changed. Commit here: https://github.com/facebook/react-native/commit/f9c2157141b8...

This seems to be just a configuration file in React Native, not really a "copy" of the project in question.

Apparently one of the Facebook developers reimplemented everything from scratch in his own account and then changed config files in the React Native repo to use his own implementation.

If it was a clean-room implementation then there's nothing wrong with that. Apart from reusing the name, but that's another discussion.

> If it was a clean-room implementation then there's nothing wrong with that.

Except potentially trademark infringement (common law tradmark rights are acquired automatically - but the name is pretty generic), and potentially still copyright infringement if Oracle wins Oracle v. Google and there is enough creativity in the sequence structure and organization of the api for it to be subject to copyright/not fair use...

> common law tradmark rights are acquired automatically - but the name is pretty generic

I was wondering about that, because there are obviously many open source projects out there who share a name, some owned by companies, some by individuals. Here's a Google GitHub Page that talks about OSS trademarking in general: https://google.github.io/opencasebook/trademarks/#common-law...

> Primarily, an unregistered mark must be: (1) used in commerce, and (2) used prior to the alleged trademark infringement. It may be counterintuitive that the “use in commerce” requirement does not necessarily mean a profitable or profit-seeking use. In fact, as the following case clarifies, the term “use in commerce” is used as a reference to Congress’s authority to regulate trademarks under the U.S. Constitution’s Commerce Clause rather than an intent to limit trademarks to profit-making activity. Where a developer released open source software under the name Coolmail, the court rejected the argument that the lack of direct profit from releasing software under the GNU General Public License rendered the original Coolmail name unenforceable as a trademark, holding that distributing software for end-users over the Internet satisfies the “use in commerce” requirement.

Even if it's a clean-room implementation, I'd consider it good style to at least credit the original project with the idea. Where's the harm in that?

Hector’s colleague here. This is exactly what happened.

Please see Hector’s response: https://github.com/facebook/react-native/issues/30395#issuec...

Open source advocate here: find a different name when you use and then reimplement a project, so that you don't cause unnecessary harm for the original project. That is all.

I agree and I am also reasonably sure it will go down as you said it will ... the problem is there is no fix. These corporate behemoths will always intentionally, or unintentionally step on people - and I say this with no animosity towards them. It is what it is. They are huge organizations with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of employees. An elephant will not try to hurt an ant, but may step on one.

Yeah but in this case it is the ant-eating beast

> what their employer does to the open source ecosystem

Does facebook habitually copy stuff without attribution?

At least with videos there's a problem with videos copied from other places and monetized on Facebook, especially because they boost the FB-hosted videos over external videos and do fuck-all about it.

Edit: HNers please!

Github issues is itself a forum and cross-linking forums like this, especially with the explicit goal of mutual pile-on amplification causes problems. The solution is to not make such submissions to HN (and to flag the ones that appear).

Well I'd rather it be like this than the opposite extreme where companies take any (MIT licensed) software they want but never give back or publish FOSS of their own

If you don't like companies using MIT-licensed software under the terms of the license, then don't publish your software with the MIT license.

Without judging the merits or truthfulness of the claims, the author of the MIT licensed software is alleging two things:

* taking the name of an MIT licensed thing which is entirely not covered by the License and I’d at least consider that bad form.

* A breach of the MIT license by the Facebook engineer - specifically removing the license and passing it off as their own work.

So the author is not - as you seem to imply - complaining about someone using their software under the MIT license.

Perhaps someone with some experience dealing with violations of MIT licenses can chime in on this.

How different does one project's code have to be from another similar project before you can claim copyright and slap your own license on it?

If a dev simply copied the entirety of someone's code and simply renamed some variables, could they claim it's their own original work (without worry of legal recourse)? I'd figure not, in which case, how much of a difference is different enough?

> if a dev simply copied the entirety of someone's code and simply renamed some variables, could they claim it's their own original work (without worry of legal recourse)? I'd figure not, in which case, how much of a difference is different enough?

This would most definitely not be enough. That would basically make all licenses useless - commercial and noncommercial alike. The MIT license is no different than any other license in that regard.

In case of the MIT license, whenever I copy any code (files or parts), I always place a comment right next to the section, pointing to the source of the copy and containing the license of the code/copyright marker. Honestly, what’s the cost? My ego doesn’t take a hit from admitting that I found and adapted something useful. The possible uses of the code are unaffected. License situation is clarified for audits. The original author gets credit for their work. There’s only upsides.

AFAIK there is no amount of changes you can make to a work that will make it stop being a derivative work.

That's why reimplementations of license-encumbered software have to be careful to have one team study the software that is to be reimplemented and describe what it does and another teams reads this specification and implements the substitute without ever looking at the original software.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design

and even that may prove problematic, as oracle vs google shows.

More importantly, if you don't intend to follow the MIT license, don't fork or clone the project then change details of it. Specifically the "The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software" clause, which seems to have been the one ignored by Facebook here.