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Comment by beckler | Hacker News Reader

I've discovered that "shameless people are shameless" is surprisingly common. I stumbled across a site for a new JS book one day, and it looked exactly like the personal site of one of our frontend developers. I asked him if he started selling his site as a template, and he goes pale. About 15 minutes later we found where someone had lifted all the assets off his site, replaced his name and photo, and put it up for sale on ThemeForest. Didn't even remove all the comments he left in the code. Dude was making about $2k a month with it. He ended up having to send him a cease and desist, and the guy only gave him about $3k as a settlement.

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> I've discovered that "shameless people are shameless" is surprisingly common.

Especially when it comes to China. https://thelinguafranca.wordpress.com/2008/03/25/do-the-chin...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2012/07/22/in-china-w...

With all due respect, these links are pretty dated and with an internet year being probably the rough equivalent of at least a half decade of the unwired world, they may not be relevant anymore.

Fair enough, but I don't think culture changes that quickly, especially in a country that large.

We're talking about people, not CPUs or flash memory. People change slowly.

The comment wasn't intended to be diminutive. There happen to be many shameless people looking to make a quick buck, but few of those people would pay if you didn't open source in the first place (or if you offered them a chance to purchase a commercial license). Even with your coworker, the only reason he received money was because the offender made a lot more from it.

It's probably a good thing that people maintain a disdain for freeloading, though. It's important for at least some of the gains from a new creation to go to the creator, otherwise the market for whatever product will stagnate because the people with resources are not the people with ideas.

Freeloading but also copyright violation. No different to selling a cracked Windows installer.

OT, but are you still doing high frequency trading? How'd it turn out?

We stopped after our second support contract. Long story short: quite a few companies wanted additional features and we ultimately had to pick one thing to pursue.

How come he have only 3k? Why didn't the plaintiff fight for more?

I asked him about it, and it sounded like the guy had spent most of the money, but I don't know why he didn't ask for more. I got the impression that he didn't care if people used his site as a template, but he just didn't want someone else profiting from it.

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