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Comment by HaoZeke | Hacker News Reader

Yes. People do copy. You'd be lucky to even find attribution. This is one of the things which open source contributors need to make peace with. The way I look at it, the original grew out of my own experiences in my head and that can't be copied. As for manifestations... The more pretty / functional code and sites there are, the better!

A tip from over ten years of FOSS : never try to track your FOSS code, nothing good can possibly come of it

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Can someone explain the part about copycats? The way I'm reading it is that the "copycats" forked the repo, and then retained the presentation while changing the content. In other words, it's like writing your own resume using someone else's publicly shared Word template. What am I missing? Why is this wrong?

because the sites are portfolios for web designers, so the medium is the message. it's as if a resume for a job as a Word template designer was written with someone else's template.

Oh, okay. Thank you for clarifying.

The repo isn't just a presentation template, it is a piece of work that proves you know your stuff. If an FE engineer's personal site is beautiful and slick, that's an obvious plus. Copying someone's handmade design (even worse, lazily) is bad manners. People are obviously going to assume you made it.

This is part of the reason I don't publish my creative works. I show them privately to friends and family, but I don't publish because part of the creative process for me is control: I may not be able to control much in the world, but I enjoy controlling every aspect of things I create, including who sees it and when. It's been very rewarding, and makes me sympathize for people like Kafka whose work got published against their explicit wishes.

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