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Comment by ianberdin | Hacker News Reader

I personally know Ivan. For many years of his life, every day, he programmed algorithm after algorithm in this complex online photo editing tool. Essentially, he devoted half his life to it. And now, when someone has literally stolen his work, nobody is reacting. And that's terrible. I think it's absolutely terrible. GitHub should respond to this.

I've seen people on Reddit writing things like, "Come on, what's the big deal? AI can write any code now." I disagree. There are hundreds of thousands of lines of code here, very complex code, which even AI wouldn't be able to write on the first try or in a single day. So this person stole this code from Photopea and built a product on top of it.

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This is a very old problem. One of my first commercial programs was a wordpress plugin and as you know, you just distribute the PHP source code in a zip file and there it is

You will never sue your way out of this. Piracy will always exist. GitHub will respond to a legal notice but whack a mole is the game and legal notices cost money

The solution in the WP community at the time was variations of the plugin as a loss leader to get revenue with support or to leverage community visibility into larger contracts for work or hosting the platform for others.

If your business model depends on your code being a secret, JavaScript is not a good play. The business model needs to enhance what the code offers since it’s basically a commodity now

Aren't all Wordpress plugins GPL due to wordpress being GPL?

No.

Yes.

But in real life, no!

There exist many WordPress plugins that are not GPL-licensed, or plugins that are ostensibly GPL but are merely wrapping things (either code or APIs) that are not GPL, which isn't exactly a compliant use.

Whether we like that is not the question I was answering.

They need to be, but many plugin developers simply break the GPL.

If they just use the api to create the plugins, no. (It's like Google vs oracle and the java API)

It's the position of wordpress that all themes and plugins are derivative work https://wordpress.org/about/license/

My understanding is because of the way PHP works all plugins are directly interacting with the wordpress code.

Wordpress does absolutely nothing to enforce this, so their position on the matter is irrelevant.

Commercial plugins are a thing, next.

I understand, but if I create some code that use no wordpress code and only API access and don't ship it with wordpress, they can't enforce a gpl licence for my code.

Sure but developers would still add licensing checks, hosting some dependency offsite, or other obfuscation to try and force people into paying for the plugin

It just doesn’t work. Anyone who wants to will take it. I don’t see this problem going away

I have served many clients with wordpress sites who would much rather pay to license a supported plugin than use a "free" plugin they have to support themselves.

And then the authors realize this and make the free plugin a nightmare to manage to coax folk into paying for it

That is the entire business model of grafana

> AI can write any code now.

Because it is trained on code of people like Ivan

If you think an AI can't reproduce this without it being a copy of the code you are sadly very very mistaken.

I've had an AI reproduce astronomical formula functions without difficulty in whatever programming language I want. Graphical algorithms aren't even a challenge.

Might be time to reconsider the business model entirely, because Pandora's box is already opened.

I agree. It's so disheartening to hear Ivan in interviews talking with passion about what he built. And it's truly impressive!

But wow, how do you stand a chance in stopping anyone when your code is all there freely available in the browser

Do you have the same stance on using adblockers when browsing the web?

Copying isn’t stealing. We settled this in the 90s.

Yeah, this bodes well for my meditation app frontend I'm going to release on GitHub. It should be fair use ish but it does seem GitHub is fairly friendly anyway.

Headspace without being tracked and having data brokers cross reference "anonymized" (sic! word wasn't in keyb. dict) info on when I meditate, using which program etc.?

Headspace updated it's privacy policy info recently, which got me to have it checked with an LLM. And it turns out that what you're doing on $100 per year meditation app is still being sold to anyone willing to pay. Using headspace lost it's charm. I wonder if Andy ever agreed to this.

Yes. It streams the content from the Healthy Minds Program but without a login or any of their tracking.

Here's a very rough draft of a comparison of the privacy of different meditation apps: https://litter.catbox.moe/crq4n62bf1prei8j.html

Balance is crazy! They're essentially a data broker themselves.

I saw someone who claims to have re-implemented Photoshop in Rust using clean room specs. I haven't checked into it yet, but it seems to have a lot of interest.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bard/comments/1wxmqpt/ive_created_o...

Now that’s interesting, thanks for bringing it up.

this “author” has been spamming his project all over social media lately. do the apps even work? everything about this screams vaporware.

The word “stealing” isn’t limited to physical objects.

I would agree, should you `rm` the copy on the server after having copied it.

Thats what the copyright lobby wants you to think, but honestly, if i copy your digital item, im not stealing it as the original still exists in your possession. That you might infringe on content made by someone else because you copied them, sure but its not stealing.

What do you do for a living?

So, I apologize if this comes off rude in advance, but to explain my general apathy:

I already don't care that much about IP "theft" on a good day. And it just seems weird to me that Ivan is complaining about other people copying his code (or is he talking about the *Craft projects, which are LLM Rust ports of common tools?) when his product is itself just a blatant adware copy of photoshop.

Pot, meet kettle and all that. Would Ivan be okay with Adobe using a third party he relies on to nuke Photopea due to IP infringement?

AI did this to every developer in the world and nobody cares. This just confirms to me that software engineers are the biggest cucks that exist right now.

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