Code Thief at Large: Marak Squires / JimBastard (Reddit Debate)

Besides some badly credited forks, I don't see the problem here. He's forking projects on GitHub and expanding on them. As for the stuff about him taking credit for Google Translate, I think it's being taken maliciously for no reason, he just made a node.js wrapper for the Google Translate API -- in fact that's what most of his projects seem to be about, taking popular projects and making them node.js compatible. Nothing wrong with that as long as he doesn't try to sweep the original authors under the rug.

What do you personally have against him, posting this on HN and reddit?

No offense, but this whole thing sounds like a overblown silly crusade against a guy you don't like.

Sure the guy isn't the most polite person in the world, and his definition of "projects" are a bit of a stretch, but, seriously, look at, say, the jquery.dataSelector.js "theft exhibit C" and tell me how else you would keep code that you found in a blog post in a github repo.

Sure, maybe it'd be courteous to just add a comment saying where code came from, but some things in that "exhibit" list are MIT licensed, and afaict, those don't even require attribution to the original author.

Re: "His "say.js" is just a shell-out to the Mac's "say" command."

Yes, but they're 15 lines of code he wrote. Hardly a "project", but still, not anywhere near "theft" either.

Can we move along now?

Original evidence: https://gist.github.com/714852