Hacker News Reader

Comment by FinnKuhn | Hacker News Reader

Using the trademark is one thing. The authors brazen reaction another: https://github.com/notepad-plus-plus/notepad-plus-plus/issue...

View on HN

This reaction is normal, aletik could have been the next Jia Tan, for all we know, and could have distributed "fake notepad++ for Mac" binaries with backdoors in them to thousand of Mac users who think it is an officially n++-endorsed project when it is not, created by someone who is unknown.

Aletik can fork n++ and find a name for it, but can't use the brand and logo, and should be stopped by all means necessary if he does not comply ASAP. Tech bloggers should know better than to promote this without checking.

"The author" in above comment refers to the author of the port. So, yes, thats what they meant.

> Tech bloggers should know better than to promote this without checking.

Agreed, and it also seems unlikely this will be their takeaway. They now get to report on the drama which will probably get more clicks.

>Tech bloggers should know better than to promote this without checking.

Tech bloggers are just LLMs these days

If you compiled notepad++ for Mac how should you make it available on the internet so people with Macs can download notepad++? Don't tell me you have to call it something else because that's absolutely insane, even if the law agrees.

> If you compiled notepad++ for Mac

That's not what happened:

- there's a lot of UI code, so it's not a mere distribution for Mac, not even sure it qualifies as a port at this point

- also, the authors page states Letov as the first author

It's in fact a fork. And unless the original author is ok with that, you shouldn't advertise your fork under the original name.

The issue is by calling it Notepad++, you're now confusing users into thinking it's officially endorsed. Which means complaints, feature requests, bugs, and even any backdoors/malware included in the unofficial version tarnishes the reputation of the official product.

This is why trademarks exist.

So what should you do? Just call it My Awesome Notepad and expect users who are searching for Notepad++ to somehow find it? A name like "John's Notepad++ for Mac" would seem reasonable to me but still isn't compliant with trademark law.

> So what should you do? Just call it My Awesome Notepad and expect users who are searching for Notepad++ to somehow find it?

Yes. Exactly that. You have no entitlement to free publicity based of someone else's hard work growing their own brand.

You could arguably say "Awesome Notepad, a Notepad++ fork" but even here, the trademark holders can demand you to remove the references to their product if they wished. In this specific instance, Given Notepad++ is open source, I suspect the maintainers of Notepad++ might have been okay with this approach. Though it's a little late for that now because the Mac port author has burned any good faith they might have had.

Another option is to gain trust with the Notepad++ maintainers and then request they link to "Awesome Notepad" project site as an endorsed 3rd party port. But again, the Mac port author hasn't taken the right approach to gain any trust there.

So as it stands, "Notepad++ Mac" is intentionally using Notepad++'s trademarks and branding as a way to get publicity quickly. I don't think they're doing it maliciously, but the intent is still dishonest.

Can you really demand someone not have any references to your product? Surely people are allowed to refer to it to explain their fork's relation to the original, otherwise it would also be illegal to compare your product against competitors in advertising or to review anything

I guess it depends on whether it's likely to confuse people?

As we speak, the Mac version's website is peppered with statements like:

> Is Notepad++ available for Mac?

> Yes. Notepad++ is now natively available for macOS as a free download.

That's over the line. This isn't a few tweaks to get it to compile on a Mac, but a wholesale rewrites of big chunks of it. It's a fork of Notepad++, but it's not the Notepad++.

I was replying to the hypothetical situation in the comment of saying "Awesome Notepad, a Notepad++ fork"

Gotcha.

This is where trademark law starts to get a little murky and the law will differ from country to country.

Does it?

Yes. For example: https://claimistry.com/trademark-law-differences-across-coun...

If it’s part of the branding, then yes.

Saying “Awesome Notepad, a Notepad++ fork” as the tagline for a product would then be using Notepad++’s trademark for Awesome Notepads branding.

If it’s just mentioned in the documents then it because a question for the courts to decide if that’s sufficient use in advertising material. And what will likely usually happen is an undisclosed settlement.

But a lot of this depends on how it’s used, how litigious the trademark holder is, and what jurisdiction this is happening in.

An example give by donho is "SomeProject : a macOS port of Notepad++" so it seems like the name can be used which will make it appear in searches. It just has to be clearly something else.

I think that's still trademark infringement.

You can tell people what something is, that is nominative use of the trademark. Actually putting it in center of the branding might be infringing, but Don Ho gave their blessing to use that, so that point is moot anyways.

Those very bad takes to push to merge a completely new codebase into Notepad++ project very much seems like a Jia Tan event. However, it’s probably not, because how bad they are. Nobody will be convinced with something like this, ever. One for sure, they don’t seem organic at all. They look like exactly how controlled political discourses are. Either there is a hit piece somewhere, or the comments are not genuine at all.

The disclaimer he put up on the website is comical. "In coordination with [original author], I will be _evolving the brand_ to …"

Smells like AI slop past its expiration date, to be honest.

Maybe this is some weird attempt to see if malicious takeover with bots is possible

Given the way the guy who "ported" Notepad++ to macOS is behaving, it's hard to think of any actual altruistic reasons to do any of this. If Don Ho wanted to port Notepad++ to macOS with LLMs, he could have just as easily done it himself and arguably achieved a superior result.

This whole endeavour on aletik's part seems like vanity at best and probably just a malware vector down the line regardless.

> malware vector down the line

My concern is the ones that didn't get caught and are waiting to pull a Jia Tan.

I honestly chuckled reading this “in coordination” comment.

Imagine being slapped across the face, and instead of saying you were slapped, you say…”in coordination with the back of their left hand”.

This entire thread actually makes me so angry for the N++ team. He was being so kind in his wording and was clearly being taken advantage of.

“I’m in NYC you have my WhatsApp” wtf does that even mean…you eat chopped cheese and have a cell phone?

A charitable interpretation is that the author is very young, by my estimate of how they write and their confusion of how accountability works it’s probably a middle-schooled kid first dipping their toes into software.

> it’s probably a middle-schooled kid first dipping their toes into software.

They've got a fake LinkedIn profile (that's 9 years old) if that's the case showing professional experience, and are using someone else's image on it and their GitHub profile and personal site.

https://aletik.me/

More likely, the guy is just a clown.

The GH contributions heatmap on the about page that's entirely blank before April is either peak performance art in the agentic world, or he graduated top of class from clown school.

The way they’re acting is par for how a lot of adults view the world. Disregarding intellectual property rights is some people’s entire personality on the internet. Piracy and ignoring IP law have been glorified for years as being an anti-corporate rebellion, but the anti-corporate message has been lost by many who believe that IP rights and trademark shouldn’t exist at all. Even when the targets are anything but corporate.

To me he sounds inexperienced/naive and a little scared (and thus “defensive”) but well-intentioned. His response makes me believe that he didn’t do it for fame, to deceive, or other selfish reasons.

I don't believe that he is naive. It looks like he wants to use the Notepad++ brand authority to capture the notepad++ macos market (which is big!) Thus he is infringing on a trademark for his own benefit.

> capture the notepad++ macos market

Is it big?

Notepad++ is big in the Windows world but I am not certain that it is automatically big on Mac. They have much more Mac-native feeling editors like TextMate, Nova, Cot, even SublimeText feels more macOS-ishy than Notepad++

I am on Linux, Notepad++ is not a name of concern on here at all and if it ever came to Linux most people wouldn't notice.

If you're in the Windows world that might seem like an improbability given how big it is there, but trust me, it's not a well known name anywhere else.

"I am on Linux, Notepad++ is not a name of concern on here at all and if it ever came to Linux most people wouldn't notice."

Strong disagree. The thing I miss in linux most is notepad++ or something as capable and usable (open for suggestions, but chances are I already tried them)

Notepadqq is a decent crack at a Notepad++ clone for Linux, but it is no longer actively maintained.

Thanks, I did not try out that one, though it being abandoned is of course not great.

Interesting. I'd have thought that Linux users would go traditional (vi vs. Emacs) or for something heavier (vscode), or quick and easy for when you just need $EDITOR (nano).

For some reasons I never liked vi nor emacs, vscode is indeed too heavy and nano too awkward. I use mostly xed, but it lacks compared to notepad++

> I miss

There's the rub, I miss. Notepad++ is thoroughly a Windows app. Linux and Mac natives have no appetite for one of the most thoroughly Windows-ass Windows app around. Switchers, sure. But take me as an example. I've been on a Mac since 2007. At this point I'm a native. I'm not even aware of what Notepad++ really does.

Well, I am a "switcher" since 20 years, so rather OS agnostic. I regulaty switch between linux and windows (and chromeos) and sometimes mac and ideally I want all my apps to work the same, no matter the OS.

Any pointers on what exactly you miss compared to Linux alternatives like Kate, Sublime, VSCode, etc? (Assuming you already tried them)

Sublime I like, but is proprietary (and there was something else). VScode is too heavy, kate as well. (But maybe with kate I just need to modify the key bindings so they match what I am used to, I only recently tried it out)

Basically, I want code folding(with option to collapse all the tree), macrorecording, search (replace) in files, but with all the goodies notepadd++ provides, where I can easily set the folder to search, what filepatterns to exclude etc.

Zed?

I thought actual n++ worked well in WINE?

Not the last times I tried it, but it has been a while (but I did also recently read about problems .. and I need a text editor to work without problems)

Always vim, never really understood why people use anything else for a dumb ide.

Ok, I might give it a try again. Funny thing: I googled "vim" and google replied with: "did you mean emacs?"

I have been using NotepadNext. Works fine.

It’s probably a few thousand users. When I switched to mac, I looked for notepad++ and settled on BBEdit (which is awesome and funny I forgot about it all these years).

This doesn’t seem like for money, but for esteem.

A shout out for BBEdit which is a 34 year old Mac native text editor that maintains a freemium license (and the free version is still quite featureful).

It doesn’t suck.®

I've maintained my copy of it from back in the MacOS 7.x days.

A malicious actor would be happy to be publicly labeled inexperienced/naive.

That reasoning holds but it is not based on any of the facts at hand. There's a reason why any community worth being apart of has a tendency to assume good faith. People make mistakes. I respect Don Ho's response and I don't see how the pitchfork brigade is bringing anything valuable to the situation.

If you’d actually installed it and realized afterward that you’d been misled, whether by someone who doesn’t understand trademarks or someone acting in bad faith, you’d probably feel differently. Leaving a comment on HN in that situation is a pretty reasonable reaction.

People are pissed because instead of taking the feedback, apologizing and acting immediately, he wrote comment after comment giving excuses. What he did is literally illegal, and ignorance or good intentions is not a solid excuse.

This. A billion times this. The community should be shouting from the rooftops that there is an intruder in the neighborhood.

Maybe there's no malice intended and this is just a colossal pile of honest mistakes. Maybe this author is as clueless as he appears. Maybe, but until he appears at the United Nations and doxes himself before embarking on a world wide apology tour, nobody in their right mind should install that binary. I wouldn't even run the build script in a sandbox.

The inverse Hanlon's razor cuts much better than the original one these days:

Never attribute to stupidity (incompetence|naivety) that which is adequately explained by malice.

You don't need an inverse Hanlon's razor, that's the natural response and a recipe for a social dumpster fire.

The smarmy dishonesty about "expanding the Notepad++ brand" actually is selfish and ill-intentioned. Perhaps he is too young and naive to fully understand that he is being parasitic. But naivety is a well-travelled path towards malice.

Regardless, he absolutely deserves to be shamed on GitHub for this. I don't like the online culture of public shame and sandbagging - I think this GitHub thread should be closed now that it's viral - but sometimes people actually do things they should be ashamed of. This needs to be a tough lesson.

I'm spamming this everywhere - taken from his blog:

> I've shipped fintech and risk products at Moody's, BNY, AxiomSL, Amex and many more. I've built platforms, designed user experiences, assembled portfolio analytics and worked on professional services teams.

Also' he's not young. Check his github avatar

It sounds like BS. Guy’s done it all if you believe his resume.

That's kinda the point. No matter if it's true or not, it puts him in bad light

You know, what's frustrating is that when I first contemptuously dismissed "Notepad++ for MacOS" as a trademark violation I did skim that stuff and accordingly just sort of assumed the port was technically legitimate, but disrespectful of copyright. But of course it was vibe-coded, and apparently chock full of stupid bugs that would have been caught with adequate manual testing. Why wouldn't I assume otherwise?

This from his website is pretty funny:

  These days I'm deep in multi-agent AI and honestly it's changed everything. I build with both hands, one on the code, one on the vision. I can finally bring to life ideas I've been carrying around for years that always needed too many people and too many quarters.

The first well-known software he vibe-coded is a buggy port of something a talented human spent many decades hand-crafting. The slop project is completely devoid of creativity or imagination, and it's going down in public flames because he was stupid about copyright. Kind of cartoonish, actually.

The sad thing is that I expect this to rise as time passes. Most vibe-coders, from what I've seen, are exactly like this guy: they have no idea of trademark or copyright law and think that they can just... Do things like this without consequences. They will self-justify until they're blue in the face and not learn anything from it. There are, of course, exceptions to this generalization, but I don't know how significant said exceptions really are going to be to this.

I don't wanna be rude but it looks like this guy just arrived on the Internet this year - around March-April and it doesn't seem like he has any prior activity. He just decided to roll this Notepad++ for macOS and that's it

Also, his medium avatar looks awfully generated.

It reads to me like English isn't his first language. Either way the complexities of open source licensing are something a lot of people don't understand.

As stated multiple times in the linked discussion: the licensing of the open source code is not the issue. It's the use of the trademark, and making their fork look like an officially endorsed one.

And the fork author was given a oppertunity to remediate without further drama. Instead, the fork author doubled down, where the possible reasons for that behavior are hard to interpret in good faith.

Yes, one of the complexities of open source licensing that people do not understand is that most copyright licenses assign only copyright and that copyright is a distinct and different concept than patents and trademarks.

Ironic this comment reads like you didn’t even grok the basics of the issue if you think open source licensing is the source of confusion.

Does he remind you of anyone?

https://www.wired.com/story/jia-tan-xz-backdoor/

His linkedin (on which he posted about notepad++) is pretty light publicly but it does have a post about him speaking at a conference in NY on product management and people actually commenting that they saw his talk. That was a year ago, so definitely possible that there's some "setup an account to look real" BS going on but at first glance my take is that he's a real person.

The people on HN might be surprised by how little the average naive software-adjacent person knows about intellectual property law. I've been following it since I was 12, but most people barely know what a trademark is let alone what enforcement looks like.

Here's my guess: Eastern European origin, currently working and likely living in NY, PM gets ahold of Claude and decides to vibe code himself a port of Notepad++. Maybe he really has good intentions, maybe he is looking to make donation money, maybe a bit of both, whatever. Probably looking for donation money. Regardless, he thinks "Oh people fork/port open source projects all the time, I'll just do that" and has no conception whatsoever that he is going to piss people off OR that he's violating the law. English is not his first language either I'd bet, and he's using Claude to write a lot of / all of his comments. Acts frankly ignorant and confused and dumb in response, doesn't know what to do, etc. AI can't help him because he's not even givin the AI context well. A shitstorm ensues.

FWIW, I did a quick/not that advanced static analysis of the code compared to the published binaries and couldn't find anything malicious. I'd leave that to the experts though for any real opinion.

TLDR;; My guess: Dumb PM gone mad with power and looking for a donation-based cash grab, possibly with the good intention of keeping the project going long term, does not know the first thing about IP and does not speak english as his first language. But an actual dude.

We'll see how it shakes out.

I'm sorry, but I don't buy that (and on a quick incomplete read, the author is betting on getting exactly that sort of pass)? It's one thing to plumb the depths of interpretations of the GPL or do a detailed compare and contrast of one license versus another (agreed: nontrivial), but "hey yo! Ima gonna use the name and branding of someone elses very, very popular project and try and make some cash from it that'd be cool right?". No...sorry...I cannot suspend my disbelief to that extent.

> Also, his medium avatar looks awfully generated.

What do you mean by this? Aren’t most avatar images generated three days?

First step would be taking down the website, second step is an apology, third step is bringing back online with new branding and eventually a final word to thank them, share the link and say they remain open to criticism.

It's not rocket science. Pretty sure even his LLM would give that strategy and implement it without burning too many tokens.

More than inexperienced, either he really can't read a room or he knows very well what he is doing.

Right? Instead we get:

- Saying he's hoping Don allows it

- "I actually did nothing wrong"

- "I actually did nothing wrong" part 2

- "I actually did nothing wrong" part 3

- Why are you so mad? Give me a week

- Why are you so mad? I added more lies to the website

- Why are you so mad? I'm working on it

... over the course of 2 days. Shutting down the website and pulling the app offline should have taken minutes.

People react differently to feedback without necessarily bad intentions. Not everyone is ready to instantly admit mistakes. Empathy goes a long way.

Reading the above, how much empathy does someone need to give before they can feel the other party has bad intentions?

"No" needs to mean something.

It’s not either-or. You can tell people No and be empathetic to their reasons at the same time. Understanding doesn’t mean agreement or acceptance. It also doesn’t mean you excuse their behavior, or allow it to continue. Empathy doesn’t mean you like what they’re doing. That would be sympathy.

In fact, understanding makes it easier to get people to do what you want.

Some argue that it is even a precondition, to meet someone where they are, to get them to change their ways. The other remaining option is violence/force, which will not fundamentally change their behavior but only shift the problematic behavior elsewhere (and often make it worse).

> It’s not either-or. You can tell people No and be empathetic to their reasons at the same time. Understanding doesn’t mean agreement or acceptance. It also doesn’t mean you excuse their behavior, or allow it to continue. Empathy doesn’t mean you like what they’re doing. That would be sympathy.

We're talking about a discussion in which the author continues their violations after being told "no", and excuses it with their "reasons".

Their reasons can come after they stop the actual wrongdoing, and maybe after they understand what they did wrong and apologize for it.

We all agree that that would be tactful. But, human empathy is neither an act of excusing the subject of the empathy, nor limited to tactful subjects.

Asking someone to empathize with their persecutor while they are actively harming that someone is generally viewed as abusive gaslighting in most other contexts.

Would you ask physical abuse victims to be empathetic towards their abusers in the middle of a beating, too? What if they were told it hurt, and asked to stop, and they instead continued anyways while repeatedly and politely saying they had good intentions in beating the victim?

Gaslighting in its original sense is a continued process of abuse that leads to a person doubting their own perception, typically with a long term PTSD as consequence. What we are discussing here are possible strategies to get somebody to change their behavior. If you consider people stating a different opinion than you to be gaslighting you, you might want to dig deeper.

I think what is happening here is a difference in understanding of what we mean by empathy, and what it entails in terms of visible action or response. I tried to make it clear that to me, you can both be understanding of the feelings and the (ir)rationality of an abuser and be clear in your boundary-setting (and possible application of protective force) at the same time. The understanding of your “opponent” can help guide your interaction, whether it is verbal communication or other. It doesn’t mean “to be nice” in your response, or accepting their actions.

The reason why I advocate for “more empathy” is because I firmly believe it can make you more successful in clear boundary setting and in communicating and achieving your goals, not weaker, especially in situations where you strongly disagree with somebody else’s actions.

To come back to the case at hand: We seem to agree that the goal is to get him to stop and take the project down. The strategies employed so far to tell him No didn’t make him stop. Now what? I suggested to try a little empathy in the response, something along the lines of “Thank you for offering your help in making NP++ even more successful! We appreciate your effort. For now, can you please take it down, and then we can discuss how you can bring your strengths and abilities to the project in a way that causes less controversy in our happy little community? Looking forward to hearing about your ideas!”. (Only works if sufficiently true; adjust where necessary.)

The goal remains the same. Only the strategy is different. It doesn’t matter if I “like” the person or not, or if I “care” about them. I am interested in achieving my goals, and it requires their cooperation for that —- unless I want to sue. Which I don’t.

With your hypothetical domestic violence abuser, you can shout No all you want at some people and they just won’t stop. If your goal is to get them to stop, you CAN try different strategies. Empathy expands your range of possible actions; it doesn’t limit them.

> Gaslighting in its original sense is a continued process of abuse that leads to a person doubting their own perception

Yes, like the slop-author here adding gaslighting onto their continuing abuse here, using polite language and self-justification to mask that they are being abusive.

> The reason why I advocate for “more empathy” is because I firmly believe it can make you more successful in firm boundary setting and in communicating and achieving your goals

Don Ho tried that first, even encouraging forks under a different name, yet the abuse still continues. Thus, the hypothesis did not hold true in this case. The other comments you see from victims about how the abuser is violating boundaries, are a direct consequence of the hypothesis being tried and failing here.

Not that it will always fail: it's probably a good idea in general. It just didn't work here. It is an unfortunate fact of life that there exist personalities in this world who simply ignore "no" or "stop hurting me" when it conflicts with their own desires. No amount of empathy will make these people immediately stop.

I did not challenge or question Don Ho’s attempts. I attribute the person’s defensive responses as reaction to other people’s displayed lack of empathy, including some posters here, not Don’s. In fact, when you scroll back you will find that I merely shared my opinion, and then continued to expand on it further to provide more information on why I have that opinion. I don’t need you to agree with me. Often, I expand on my opinions more as a service to other readers, who may still be interested in reading about them.

I don’t share the analysis that it didn’t work; it didn’t work so far; the story is live and still unfolding.

His defensive responses we can set aside for a moment. Even if we ignore those, we see him acting abusively: refusing to get consent; refusing to accept "no", from the very beginning.

> I don’t share the analysis that it didn’t work; it didn’t work so far; the story is live and still unfolding.

I think that Don would, and speaking objectively, we can see that it did not achieve the objective of immediately ceasing violations (potentially including, but not limited to, temporarily taking the site offline while further discussions are had). The immediacy is an inherent part of the objective. A solution that takes days, much less weeks, before the abuse stops, is an inadequate remedy here, and that has been explained to the abuser.

If someone was being physically abused, I'd like to think that I'd try to step in. What value do you see in this comparison?

Why limit that protective instinct to physical abuse?

What we see in the thread is people doing what you're talking about: trying to step in to stop abuse. The fact that it isn't a beating doesn't mean it isn't abuse.

I'm not limiting outward action. I'm making a case for additional inward action: empathy.

Edit: I think you're mistaking empathy with passivity.

I saw plenty of empathy in the discussion for the slop-copy author.

I also saw plenty of empathy in the discussion for Don Ho.

There was probably more of the second than the first, which makes sense, as the victim deserves more empathy than the perpetrator, especially while the perpetrator continues to victimize others.

You misunderstand empathy. Its purpose is to see things clearly: a wrongdoer, victimizer, etc. is still human. A victim is not more human. Empathy is outside circumstance. Only when you don't understand it, you start using it in concert with sympathy. They're different things. Ask yourself this: do you need a lack of empathy to recognize that someone is acting in a destructive way?

If your entire argument is predicated upon a singular, unsupported claim by yourself that I misunderstand something, I don't think we'll have a productive conversation (especially if the claim is not correct).

I said what I said: There were people showing EMpathy for the people on both sides of the conflict in that thread. I said it because it's true. It's true and it's understandable, and probably better than if it were for just the perpetrator.

Perhaps it is you who misunderstands the term? Between us two random people out of billions, it might statistically be just as likely, and neither of us is an impartial judge of the other's understanding. Do you see how that approach to discussion is thus not productive?

We lost each other a ways back. Thanks for the discussion.

altek has been given a number of off-ramps and alternatives to proceed. His continued resistance to take those isn't a sign of naivete, it's a sign of bad faith.

To me it seems like a "idgaf" mentality, and trying to get as much and push as far as he can. Never in his replies he shows any sign of admitting that he should not have put the notepad++ name like this, that it looked like an actual endorsement and this was wrong. He just finally (after putting repeated pressure) accepts to change the branding. I don't understand why some people like him do that and how.

I assume it is the "fake it till you make it" mentality, like "fake the endorsement until they actually endorse your project". Clearly doesn't work like this, but if this mentality has gotten you far, why not try it here too?

You can be inexperienced and naive, and at the same time understand when you make a mistake. Being "inexperienced" because you actively refuse to learn from what people tell you that you do wrong is not inexperience anymore.

What LLMs have brought to our industry is exposure of how many people in it are total pieces of shit. You have the hucksters who are out there trying to get you to invest in their LLM startup and they constantly use language that is functionally lying about what their product is by likening what it does to actual functioning human brains and personalities. You have the fantasists who see a grammatically correct sentence as proof of omnipotence and then run around telling everyone how AI has totally changed everything. You have the posers who use LLMs to cut-n-paste code from other's repos, directly and indirectly, and then claim they wrote it and pretend to have skills and abilities they don't have. Then you have the ignoramuses in media and such who know nothing, they hear all the hucksters and fantasists jibber-jabbing and proceed to flood the world with untrue stories about AI and it's affects on society.

No inexperience here. It is malice

thats a lot of companies for a guy so young. Probably gets the boot a bunch.

He was told by the original author to not use the name for his project 5 days ago. 3 days ago he wrote "Guys, all I wanted to do is to make Notepad++ available on mac and keep it open and free. I'm talking to Don. I really hope he will be ok with the name. It actually expands notepad++ brand to mac."

Already ignoring the authors wishes. He said clearly it is not OK and wants the name changed. That's it - but he keeps ignoring it.

I fail to see good intentions here.

Yeah. And if you want to expand an existing brand that's not yours, you ask first, and only continue after a green light from the owner.

Well, that part might be temporarily excused by naivety. But he did ask, was not replied to - and he did it anyway. So I actually do not believe in naivety. And now it is past that point anyway.

You mean asking for forgiveness is easier than asking for permission is not a valid way to walk through life?

In general really no, but I do see the point in not asking for permission for everything to get anything done. (I am german, here the saying is, anything not explicitely allowed is forbidden and there is no fun in this)

But I hate the stance when people do it, when it is clear that no permission will be given. To establish facts on the ground so to say.

(But there are exceptions where I think it is legit)

Judging by the fork author's name, should've asked them in russian :-/

Product manager in software for 10 years. I cannot believe the inexperienced defense.

the road to hell is paved with good intentions

> His response makes me believe …

I’d pay more attention to his behavior.

Naive my ass.

From the fork's authors page

> Andrey Letov is a New York product leader and software engineer.

And then a long list of professional achievements follows.

He knows exactly what he's doing

All of his responses are moronic misreadings of NP++'s actual author's comments, which lead me to believe that he is acting entirely in bad faith.

    > The authors brazen reaction another

I want to clarify. Are you implying that Don Ho (donho) or Andrey Letov (aletik) is having the "brazen reaction"? From your link, I found aletik's first comment here: https://github.com/notepad-plus-plus/notepad-plus-plus/issue...

When I first read about the MacOS port from HN, I also assumed it was blessed by Don Ho. I was fooled by the new website. Now that I know it was not coordinated, it looks weird (even creepy/uncanny valley'ish) in hindsight, especially using all the same icons and branding, and including Don Ho on the author page.

The brazen part is Andrey Letov pretending to not understand.

In case anyone else was confused. The author of this fork replied to some trademark discussion with a “fuck trademarks” response. He edited/deleted it but you can still see it in some of the quoted replies.

Fork author is either a young kid or clueless.

Or a tech founder (gestures at Ubercab)

The only place I see that is from a user "LiEnby" not "aletik", and none of aletik's existing messages are edited. All replies I see with the message are also to LiEnby. I don't agree with aletik's slow response in any way, but I don't think your claim is correct either. Do you have anything to prove that this was said by aletik?

If that’s the case good catch. I had the whole conversation unhidden and it was riddled with odd quotes. My bad for the misrepresentation. My conclusion still holds, fork author is a fool and is playing the slow game for no reason.

All good, and agreed the fork author is in the wrong here. I just like keeping the facts straight since that can inform better arguments and discussions.

It was not him as far as I can tell. It was this guy: https://github.com/nukeop that showed examples of the trademark law being stupid sometimes, and this guy: https://github.com/LiEnby that said "fuck trademarks"

The author of the "rewrite" didn't seem to say this

AI means never having to ask permission. Or forgiveness, it seems.

See all you do is take the repo and put it into the AI and then ask the AI to regenerate it to another directory. Et Voila the AI generated it and the person didn't do anything illegal.

Okay that might not be okay. So you take screen shots, release notes and feed that to the AI. Now it's fine.

Even better is if you can get the data trained into the model! Because then it's totally different right?

1 shotting companies is the future and that's why so many companies are accelerating ai by giving all their code and plans to the leading ai providers for money.

Asking? Inessential!

That response doesn't seem brazen. It sounds like they had a deeply mistaken understanding of what an open source license grants and believed it would be fine to use the name and branding as well as the code. Unless I missed it, it sounds like they are changing how their site communicates its relationship to the original source.

What I find baffling about that conversation are the people having their LLMs weigh in on what the author should have done. Verbal takedown by LLM is a new level of cringe.

Edit: There are some replies I hadn't seen, their confusion and request for patience sounds like they still don't fully appreciate their mistake.

It sounds brazen and incredibly entitled. The LLM response seems fitting for a vibe coded project with a vibe brain author.

I am on the fence about using an LLM to respond to situations like this, particularly if it is a screenshot and it is obvious what they are doing.

It is snarky and cringe, but also goes to show how poorly the decision making is by the author that even an LLM is pointing out how badly you are handling this.

Especially when this is clearly a vibe coded project.

What's amazing to me is how I was downvoted into oblivion on a few different subreddits and forums for expressing concern about the vibe-coded nature of the project and that the author of the Mac port appeared to be using the Notepad++ name/branding without any official blessing from the project.

There's a lot of people even in here who don't seem to get it, who call it a "simple" task to do the port and are confused why this is a bad thing at all. A lot of people in the industry (and perhaps everywhere) have a hard time with ethics and doing the right thing.

> I wanted is to bring Notepad++ to mac and allow people to find Mac version of Notepad++ quickly and use it.

Seems he’s ignorant of the ecosystem too (or possibly disingenuous, or maybe doesn’t realise he’s done something wrong or why). Notepad++ runs perfectly on macOS under Wine. I’ve been using it that way for two or three years now. Wasn’t a struggle to set up either: I simply ran the installer as if I was running Windows and then it #justworked.

Indeed, and in general. Popular, well supported open source project around for decades not available in POSIX, somehow?

In Linux, the only things I don't have with Wine are whatever the other clipboard is that highlighting text gets filled with and access to network shares. Such nothingburgers that I've never spent real time to figure out if there's a solution.

I've never managed to get MS Office running successfully on Wine, at least not any recent version of it anyway. That might work fine on Linux but it doesn't get past the first handful of pages of the installer on macOS.

It's not the end of the world, but the Windows version of Excel is streets ahead of the macOS version, which is why I was keen to make it work.

Otherwise, everything I really care about from Windows - the odd utility, along with retro computing emulators - seems to run fine on Wine. I haven't got into more modern games so can't speak to how well they tend to run.

MS Office is not an open source project.

When someone has an issue getting something like Notepad++ running with Wine, they have the option to inform the Notepad++ project or if they possess the skills, submit a change so that Notepad++ will run smoothly on Wine. Or, inform Wine and they may figure out how to fix the issue within Wine.

I haven't bothered getting Office running on Linux in a very long time. The only thing I miss is a convenient way to print envelopes, as LibreOffice is incapable of doing this. However, I mail far less than I used to so I just hand write the addresses.

I think the only real way to run Office is on Windows in VirtualBox, which I still haven't had any need to bother with.

> I think the only real way to run Office is on Windows in VirtualBox

I think you’re right, but I just don’t want to run full Windows because it’s such a resource hog. It’s always chewing CPU for some background task or other, and so it drains the battery noticeably quicker.

I have the Mac version of Office, which is fine for most things, and LibreOffice fills the gap for a small handful of non-Excel tasks, but I do love Windows Excel for more complex spreadsheet tasks.

"I will give you one week to change the name."

"No, I'm not going to do that."

"Okay fine, I'll report you to Cloudflare now."

"BROOOOOOOO you said you'd give me a week?!?!"

It looks like it went more like this:

"Stop using my trademark." [1]

"OK, give me a couple of weeks. I was intending to expand your brand." [2]

"No. I've reported this to your CDN." [3]

---

[1]: This is the correct way to handle things.

[2]: This has the appearance of being evidence of -deliberate- fuckery.

[3]: This kind of action is the inevitable result of deliberate fuckery.

Funny how the vibe-coding speed grinds to 0 the moment people catch on to their bullshit. A name change requires a week but shitting out 200 commits with Claude takes barely a month.

This comment really put it into perspective to me. I wouldn't have phrased it better myself

Yoink, I'm stealing this quote!

We have found the limits of agentic engineering. Changing a logo on a website apparently takes weeks.

Oh what the hell. This is the vibe coder mentality. Grift, as far as it goes

Reply on news.ycombinator.com