There is no official XScreenSaver GitHub repository | Hacker News Reader

There is no official XScreenSaver GitHub repository

github.com

92 pointsst_goliath65 comments

This fork is great: https://github.com/cowmix/xscreensaver

This is a work of art.

> It's worth noting that the phrase "It's fine. You'll get over it." is doing an enormous amount of emotional heavy lifting. It's not dismissive — it's pre-emptive closure. It anticipates your grief and resolves it in seven words.

AI still isn't great at counting, I suppose.

Couldn't decide if contradictions count as one word or two, and took the mean.

This is amazing, pretty much every single thing I hate with all the AI-generated documentation nowadays, all in one repo! And conveniently organized across >20 separate files haha

GitHub is not authoritative and never should be considered as authoritative. Anyone can publish your stuff on there as your name.

It’s a huge problem. Glad to see he’s at least put a placeholder on there.

The only thing missing is to mark it as Archived so that all of the GitHub features are turned off.

Jeff Merkey is the person claiming the "xscreensaver" organisation on GitHub, despite it not being, and never has been, his project.

He has promised to drop that and move the repo to /hisname/xscreensaver, but only if JWZ flatters his ego first. Sounds like he knows he's squatting on someone else's good name, but thinks he's so clever and well versed in trademark law that he'd be deliberately antagonistic all the way to the end of a huge legal bill. Just to force him to do the right thing.

He knows what the right thing is and could do it at any time, but just look at his priors and tell me he'll do that:

https://www.dmlp.org/threats/merkey-v-does

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitra...

I know that name ... https://lwn.net/Articles/140157/

Well, it's also impossible to link to the official one (here https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/ )

without seeing eggballs in a cup due to JWZ's ego. So I say there's no winners with two big egos like these.

Both of the people involved in this dispute sound insufferable.

Nah, JWZ is great. He can be a little much online, but you would be you too if you had to put up with the kind of stuff he has had to.

I find it funny. A bit weird, but harmless.

When looking into screensavers on Wayland I stumbled across his articles and found them interesting enough to subscribe to his RSS feed, only to unsubscribe a day later after finding out he's an insufferable egomaniac (who treats his RSS feed as Twitter)

https://github.com/xscreensaver/xscreensaver/issues/3

This was linked in the blog

pros of having a Github repo:

* people can find your project easily

* stars are a pretty good indicator of authenticity

* you can browse, search code right away

* a place for people to contact you

cons:

* some maintenance

* people have a place to contact you

He has an email for people to contact him.

> stars are a pretty good indicator of authenticity

of which he now has 1000... on a non-project!

another con is that you have to agree to the ToS etc. of GitHub, which might be a con depending on how pedantic you want to be about your software license.

This is totally on brand for JWZ.

Once again, jwz shows that he's way ahead of the average corporate ass kiss...

Github has gone to shit ever since it's purchase by M$

xscreensaver is a generic term and Jamie gave me his express permission to create this repo, then whined about it when people who were tired of dealing with Jamie and his unreasoning hatred of MIcrosoft and Github started using the fork. The project is open sourced under a permissive license, and I have just as much right to distrbute the project as anyone else. What's really going on here is that Jamie wents to block visibility into how many peoples code he has pilfered from who knows where since he realeases the entire package as "his" and doesn't want people to know just how much code, bug fixes, and QA fixes are contributed by others. This is why he doesn't want xscreensaver on github. If anyone's development process cannot be trusted, it's his, since there is ZERO visibility into peoples contributions to his project. This contrasts to a public github repo that is wide open and doesn't have timebombs and aother malicious code which is presently in xscreensaver.

If you’re actually the person who created the xscreensaver/xscreensaver repo, it fascinates me as you describe it as

> Novell Netware SMP console screensaver for X11, Gnome, KDE Plasma, and Wayland Desktops

> The netwaresmp screensaver written by Jeffrey Merkey <jeffmerkey@gmail.com> and Cosimo Streppone <cosimo@cpan.org>, based on PopSquares, Deco hacks, loadsnake, and Novell's Netware SMP.

…and then accuse jwz of being shifty about contributions.

Also:

> timebombs and aother malicious code which is presently in xscreensaver.

Links or GTFO. That’s quite a libelous accusation if you can’t prove it.

So what's the point of making a GitHub if you're not going to publish source code? Is this an inside joke?

To prevent impersonation and having people download potential malware from repositories posing as the official xscreensaver distribution channel.

I am pretty sure the distro packagers all know where to get the real code from, and its packaged for everything that runs X so minimal risk.

Also assuming something on github is the official repo is dangerous anyway. There might be multiple repos with the same name, there might be a more actively developed fork and the official one might be unmaintained, etc.

It's a dangerous thing which nevertheless happens every day.

So... this doesn't hurt, and can definitely help. It isn't perfect, but it cost JWZ very little to do.

Why are you arguing against it?

Because I do not think making github a way of verifying things is a good idea. It encourages people to assume that whatever they find on github is safe.

The code is not there, but the jwz has a github repo saying it is not there: https://github.com/xscreensaver-official/xscreensaver

As for "happens every day". How often, really? JWZ says "I strongly recommend that you install a binary package rather than compiling it yourself." I would guess very few end users compile xscreensaver themselves.

May be also be relevant to link to JWZ's post about it: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/10/gitsquatting/

it looks like the site is offline :(

jwz also famously special cases traffic from hacker news. You may have better luck if you copy & paste the link to avoid sending referrer headers.

You need to open it incognito to avoid the Hacker News insult image!

You cannot hotlink to jwz; he will redirect you to a testicle in an eggcup based on referer header.

Is it known why this is happening?

He doesn't like Hacker News.

Warning: it persists somehow, so you can't click on a link from HN, realise the problem, then copy+paste to correct it. Looks like you need to open an incognito window, use a different browser, or maybe otherwise clear your session.

Just delete the cookies of jwz.org (to be specific, the cookie called HN)

Everytime a jwz link is posted on HN I click on it, and it always works fine. Like just now for the above link.

I mean, you can hotlink to jwz. There are just well-justified consequences if you do so from HN.

My apologies (I actually knew this, and forgot); unfortunately, I cannot edit my post now to advice people to enter the URL manually.

I haven't seen a site that hurts my eyes this much for a very, very long time.

to prevent a malware or something showing up as the top result on Google Search?

Opening with the word "I" and continuing in that manner is the real reason there's no official xscreensaver repository

Instead of providing a mirrored repository, they decided to intentionally not fixing the correctly identified problem while simultaneously still living 30 years in the past.

Setting up a git mirror that auto syncs takes less than 2mins of effort. And way less time than writing up this README that's just there to lecture people. If it's about disagreement with github, there's also better alternatives.

You can still setup the mirror and be done with it, and put the original repo links at the top in the README.

> Maybe someone should fork xscreensaver as xscreensaver-ng as a community project?

Feel free.

It's obvious that the author wants to make a statement, and has their own reason to not expose their work on GitHub. Setting up a mirror would probably contradict these reasons.

> It's obvious that the author wants to make a statement

Microsoft destroyed his company via illegal means.

Microsoft own GitHub.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars

If Facebook had bought github, they would have made automated squatting mirrors for all the packages like xscreensaver.

The upstream has no public repository, neither on GitHub nor anywhere else.

JWZ might not even use git in the first place, the source might be in a local SVN repo, or just a series of tarballs and patches, assuming it is version controlled at all.

I didn't criticize the motivations to ditch GitHub. I applaud that.

I criticized the intentional creation of a GitHub account just to write a README file wherein they say that there's no repository, instead of providing any useful information for people looking for a repository.

If there's no repository and you go to such great lengths just to clarify that there isn't any, then maybe you can just push your code to codeberg or gitlab or a selfhosted gogs instance if you don't trust them?

Nobody said that he MUST accept pull requests or MUST engage with any community at all. You can just disable all the features, I do that too since 4chan raided my repos in 2021 and GitHub didn't do shit about it.

But this way at least there's no risk for people installing malware infiltrated forks of xscreensaver on their machines. And that's what is the important part that wasn't actually solved/avoided/prevented with that README file.

The page provides useful information. It tells you where you can download the XScreenSaver source code (from https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/), and how you can send patches (via email)

It doesn't need to provide anything else. Nobody is required to sign up to your preferred platform, or make their work available in a way you prefer to consume it. Get over yourself. If you want to contribute, contribute as requested. Or don't, the license allows you to host your own version, just be clear it's your version.

JWZ went to great lengths on github.com, solely because some other shitheel registered the "xscreensaver" organisation and went out of their way to make it seem like it's official, and github.com's google juice means it outranks the real site. Hence the need for the effort to solve that problem (reputation management and SEO after a copycat misrepresents themselves as you)

Putting a repo on Github, versus putting a notice on Github that there's no repo, does not change the risk of people installing malware. While someone else still has the top ranked page for your software, they remain the most likely place a moron in a hurry[0] will download from. You adding a repo doesn't help, you getting their repo removed, and salting it to prevent recreation, does help.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_moron_in_a_hurry

Having spent (way too much) time on HN, I have come to realize that there are people in this industry -- in fact quite a few of them -- who cares nothing about being nice/cooperative/helpful/pragmatic and getting things done, but just want to show off their ego/opinion and make a statement.

Many names come to mind but I am too scared to post that list.

> they decided to intentionally not fixing the correctly identified problem

Which problem?

> You can still setup the mirror and be done with it, and put the original repo links at the top in the README

There is no original repo to link to. That's why the README says that there isn't one.

> Setting up a git mirror that auto syncs takes less than 2mins

Prove it.

> Prove it.

There's enough demo videos on how to use gogs, github or forgejo on YouTube.

I have faith in your ability to use the YouTube search.

Why do you presume he uses git, though? He might, but he may as well use cvs or sccs or just a set of dated folders named “…-final2(7)”.

> Why do you presume he uses git, though? He might, but he may as well use cvs or sccs or just a set of dated folders named “…-final2(7)”.

He might also still be using SunOS or HP/UX or maybe even 386BSD.

But is that likely? Not being pwned/hacked for 25+ years while still using the same old OS? On the internet that changed quite a bit since HTTP/0.9? While using the GitHub website with TLS and HTML5 and JS requirements to register an account which doesn't run in such an outdated browser?

I think your assumptions about statistical likeliness are a bit off.

I'm not sure if you know who jwz is, because I wouldn't put any of those in the realm of impossibility.

But I think it's plausible that he might not've migrated his ancient codebase (not meant as a pejorative, but just factually) to broadly multiuser tooling. If he's maintaining the project locally, I can imagine him having spun up a svn repo way back when and not moving past it. While I love git, it might not have a lot of advantages for his specific use case.

Right now, I would love to live 30 years in the past.

me too…

Or they could not. It’s their project they can do what they want you are not entitled to their labour.

Using a public source code hosting product is a choice.

Also centralising everything in one place is a seriously bad idea.

A link to a .tar.gz file published on someone's personal website serving as the only way to access source code also seems a centralized solution.

I don't think we need to worry too much about there not being enough xscreensaver source tarballs out there for disaster recovery purposes.

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