I don’t see why having the CEO of a company justify themselves, and bear the burden of proof, for using an MIT library would be a desired outcome.

Put another way, he forgot to get back to the guy whose project/hosting space his company was using, for a whole month, and he came back with a classy response and decent amount of detail. Everybody wins. Except the people who think there's a court in session here and are worried us plebians are putting _CEOs of companies_ on trial

Atleast put some effort into reading all the material if you want to shame somebody.

1) Initial email was sales pitch that did not touch the problem at all. Which retool responded to by the way.

2) CDN is hardcoded into the JS library. Why would you even do that and then shame people? If it’s against the ToS then you need people point to the ToS first. It’s the author’s fault here.

3) MIT license. How many times do we have to go through this. Retool could just fuck off but even before this witch hunt began, they were already donating.

4) Some human communication explaining the problem wouldn’t hurt. Personally I’m more likely to turn down using faker.js now.

> CDN is hardcoded into the JS library. Why would you even do that and then shame people?

It’s worth noting that before the fakercloud.com URLs were hard-coded into the library, the library was hard-coding a different service’s S3 URLs (uifaces.co) and only stopped when they became inaccessible:

https://github.com/Marak/faker.js/commit/e45648439ff5dd9adbe...

https://github.com/Marak/faker.js/issues/1055

So it seems a little unfair to complain that Retool are embedding URLs to your CDN when this library was doing the same thing to UI Faces a few months ago.

Oh damn really? What a sleazy hypocritical thing to do.

This is a very good overview of the situation. It's sad how Retool's name was dragged through the mud for daring to use an MIT licensed open source project.

They still need to be dragged a bit for copying someone's project. There is nothing against it in the license, but it is still pretty crappy to copy someone's offering and offer it up for free. Especially when you built your free offering on the back of the product you are killing.

I disagree. If you don't want anyone just come by, copy your product and offer it for free, don't release it under MIT. There is no "bro code" when it comes to software licenses.

By its very nature, the "bro code" refers to a "code" that doesn't actually exist, which makes your comment quite ironic. On measures of aptness, that makes it a comparison that's not apposite at all, but instead opposite.

It's generally considered bad form to privatize OSS for your own gain, whether there's a price tag on it on day 1 or not. Ex. VLCs issues over the years

"dragged through the mud"? :X

people way overreact online

Is there some reason that, at least 13 hours later, the blog post hasn’t been replaced with a mea culpa for accusing these folks of something that ended up being a problem in your own library?

What power do you think the person you're responding to has over the content of the linked blog post? They're the link submitter, not the post author.

Oh, damn. I thought I’d read further down the thread that they were one and the same but I see he specifically says otherwise. I guess it’s me that owes the mea culpa.

They still copied the fakercloud site, did they not?

My understanding is they used faker.js to generate urls, and those urls referenced fakercloud. So the open source project faker.js ends up pointing you at fakercloud without realizing it.