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Comment by latexr | Hacker News Reader

I’ve had several people steal my open-source code for different projects before. I’m talking copying (not cloning) the whole thing, changing the credit to their name, making no other modifications, and then republishing on their account.

Fortunately they never gained much traction. The ones I know about I blocked on GitHub with a note. No idea if they ever found out or if they tried workarounds, but I figured there’s not a lot more I could do about it and it’s not worth the headache.

I continue to share openly.

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What license did you use? Most licenses require that forks change the name, few require credit except for original copyright headers, and no licenses require modification

> Most licenses require that forks change the name

I was under the impression that the opposite was the case; that requiring a name change was extremely rare, but some historically important free software packages had it (one such being LaTeX, IIRC), so it was, somewhat grudgingly, considered acceptable. But no normal licenses (like BSD, GPL, Apache, etc.) requires name changes today, AFAIK.

I was mistaken. GPLv3 only offers a provision to require it. Firefox also requires that the name be treated as a protected trademark. I don't know how clearly one gains rights to names of open sourced projects with typical trademark policy though. I've tended to change the name on my own forks if I am not forking just to contribute upstream, out of caution for trademark (even if unregistered) and general reputational hazards of becoming a public face for someone else's project under their chosen name.

edit: Looks like the reality is quite complex: https://google.github.io/opencasebook/trademarks/#license-te... this goes into detail on each popular license

> GPLv3 only offers a provision to require it.

IIRC, this was inserted into GPLv3 precisely so that older software with that requirement, but otherwise under a permissive license, could be relicensed into GPLv3 if necessary.

I don’t recall the license in every case, but I remember some were with BSD3 and another was with The Unlicense. Even if the latter means Public Domain, it was still a shitty thing to do, and (I checked) it was specifically illegal according to the law in their country (it specifically said you can’t put your name on someone else’s work, even if public domain).

do u find it typically only happened on projects that gained traction in the first place?

They all had some traction, probably a few thousand users but nothing crazy.

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