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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

There was this too:

https://github.com/JohnPostlethwait/fixme

actually the tool is mainly based on this tool .. but the guy is not maintaining it and i decided to fill in some of the gaps. Thanks for the pointer though

I am John Postlethwait. You could have submitted a PR. That's when/how open source works. I even state that I am happy to look at incoming changes, I'm just not actively maintaining it.

This is a very minor, nigh silly, project but this sort of wanton bifurcation hurts open source's reputation and is already a huge problem in the Node community.

While I agree in general that PRs are better than forks, I don't think what you're saying is totally fair. Your choice of licensing explicitely allows forks (and almost anything else) to happen. There have been many discussions on the topic [1], and there is no easy solution.

Then, your choice of words is not ideal:

>NOTE: I no longer actively maintain this package. I'd love to get PRs to keep it going though!

If it's not maintained anymore then I as a developer don't really gain anything (bugfixes, features) by submitting a PR vs. just forking myself. So the choice to fork is understandable, even if it's not what you intended to happen.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/10/how-d...

Except it isn't a fork. It's basically two projects merged into a new one and a small blurb in the readme to that effect. Why not fork and contact John about taking the original one over? If he doesn't respond within a reasonable time, run with the fork. I don't get the sense that happened here.

I think the issue is less about license and more about what is good form and helps to keep the ecosystem a bit less cluttered.

The name on the license was changed I think that totally justifies the remarks made and they were made extremely courteous given the situation.

Forking is fine, merging two packages is fine, removing the authors name from the license (while leaving his name all over the rest of the package, which shows that there is no malicious intent, merely some confusion) is not.

Just in case you didn't know: If you used portions of Johns code, you agreed to the terms of his license. As such, you're required to include Johns name in the copyright notice, as the license specifies that thte copyright notice should be reproduced in full. You can add your own name above that, but you still have to keep the complete original copyright notice with Johns name in there [1].

Not doing that is not nice, and in the worst case could get you in legal trouble.

Original license: https://github.com/JohnPostlethwait/fixme/blob/master/LICENS... Your license: https://github.com/ahmadassaf/code-notes/blob/master/LICENSE...

[1] http://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/17823...

thanks a lot for the pointers. I have just updated the license (actually copied Johns license and just added my name next to his)

I missed that with no intention of ignoring the great work of John

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