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Comment by mock-possum | Hacker News Reader

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.

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The old commit history can still be accessed here:

https://github.com/material-theme/vsc-material-theme/activit...

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.

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

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.

https://github.com/material-theme/vsc-material-theme/commit/... is the initial MIT licensed commit

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.

If you think that sucks, check out T Mobile trademarking magenta https://www.npr.org/2019/11/25/782723429/t-mobiles-parent-te...

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?

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.

No, trademarks are issued to logos and slogans.

Yes, but many logos are also copyrightable.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

Well, no, because speeding increases the energy of potential collisions, and also encourages others to speed. If you have to drive more than once, "speeding" isn't necessarily a dominant strategy.

Would that change if cars could go fast enough, say mach 3?

When driving, you want to keep your velocity relative to other cars as low as possible, while retaining your ability to avoid obstacles / not murder cyclists and pedestrians.

If cars could go at mach 3, then you'd want to avoid roads entirely: it's not feasible to avoid obstacles at that speed, and you certainly don't want to get hit by shockwaves or – worse – actual cars travelling at such relative velocities. So no, you would have worse problems in this hypothetical.

Yes, or relativistic velocities. I figured that harm due to the energy of the collision is limited by death, while time spent on road tends to zero, but your mention of shockwaves brings to mind that a sufficiently high-energy collision would also be a danger to otherwise uninvolved road users, or residents of nearby towns, so my first assumption was incorrect. (I leave aside the problem of maintaining control of a mach 3 road vehicle as an implementation detail.)

Some years back, I was driving to the town of Apt, in a hilly area of Provence. I was on a secondary road and going roughly the speed limit, maybe a little more. I was passed on a curvy section of road like I was standing still by a woman who was simultaneously smoking, talking on her phone and examining her face in the mirror. It was an amazing display of needless risk and even though I was alone, I started laughing.

> 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.

My consideration on this is:

A lot of software that at least I write privately is rather a manifestation of some deeper values/opinions that I have. So in some sense the software is just the tip of an iceberg, a manifestation of something deeper. The software might isolatedly be independently useful for other people, but this is not is essence. Its essence is the deeper values/opinions that made the software to be created.

In this sense, it is rather the rational thing to expect that most discussions of the software are strongly intertwined with the values/opinions of the programmer, because these form the bottom of the iceberg of the software.

P.S. Just to be clear: I am not the kind of person who does personal jabs or passive aggressive snipes.

If we stick by what you say, the maintainer may be uninitiated by copycat culture. Forking is a form of it, but so is shameless copying. If a person perceives theft, then they may respond in all kinds of abhorrent ways. Of course, we onlookers will yell out that it’s not that big of a deal in this case, but we can do nothing about the individuals perception.

Is this the person’s first time having an idea of theirs taken (appropriately or inappropriately)? Their sense of right and wrong may be just fine (speaking of value systems), but their reaction is intense.

There’s either more to the story or baby just experienced a little bit of life, and it hurts.

Edit:

From the maintainers:

Today we found Sublime Text authors just stole the WHOLE repository publishing the theme again, under their name, by replacing ANY reference of original authors with their names.

We opened a pull-request to restore the original theme made by us with all the credits. Let's see if they accept it, or they want to keep the stolen repository.

As I suspected Watson, the persons perceives theft.

> 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.

So I run a small game that has a couple thousand active users, and part of that is allowing users to chat via written text. The amount of vitriol some users spew just amazes me. If they acted like that in person, I expect they would get punched in the mouth quite often. I also have a suspicion that some of these people are literally mentally ill, and online is basically where they live.

> I also have a suspicion that some of these people are literally mentally ill, and online is basically where they live.

Some of it may be because of this. However, I also think that the absence of risk of being mouth-punched contributes a lot. I feel like lots of people are deeply hateful, distrusting and angry in real life, and the risk of social and legal repercussions is the only thing that's keeping a lid on their disregard for others. I think that if this danger of consequences was removed, they would do unspeakable things.

> I also have a suspicion that some of these people are literally mentally ill, and online is basically where they live.

It's certainly reasonable to expect that there are at least some mentally ill people in any decent-sized community, but the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory[0] suggests -- and I agree -- that there are many people who just turn into complete assholes when they are anonymous or semi-anonymous, and can hide behind their computer, tens or hundreds or thousands of miles away from the people they interact with.

I don't know the demographics of your game, but this is especially true of teenagers. (But not exclusively true.)

[0] https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboa...

> I don't know the demographics of your game, but this is especially true of teenagers. (But not exclusively true.)

It's just a card game, and I expect that the average age is actually quite a bit older. Which is one of the reasons why I am quite surprised at the rhetoric used, because I would have thought that "adults" wouldn't behave that way. I was very wrong.

There's a fun little MMO-lite that reminds me of Escape Velocity[0]. Its chat system seems to filter and translate on the fly using some tiny ML models, and I think the guy behind it wrote everything himself.

The interesting thing about his implementation is that seeing e.g. Chinese being replaced in-line as it's translated feels way more amazing than knowing a translation has occurred in the background. He's hidden the time difference between paying for a service or running it yourself behind an animation.

[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1717290/Subspace_Discover...

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