marak has a documented history of mental illness and downright odd behavior. Talented dev and troubled individual. There's a pretty concise video covering what went down with some history here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6S-b_k-ZKY

That video doesn't discuss marak's "history of mental illness". Do you have some information on this?

Here's some information:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-new-york-bomb/new-yor...

That escalated quickly.

I don't think he cares at this point.

I think this is a person that has been driven to the absolute end of their patience. If he's really barely been getting by, then I can only imagine the sheer frustration he must be feeling. Not only are there swathes of fortune 500 companies which depend on his package but don't contribute a dime, but he also had a company with millions of dollars in funding look at his idea and then weaponize his own project to beat him to market.

It seems completely insane to me to give away work and then expect compensation for it.

But completely sane to base your project on a package of code you don't control?

Or to lock up his Github account for exercising his prerogative onto his own code?

His behaviour is unusual, but that, you know, could change easily. It could become the normal just like that. Puff.

> But completely sane to base your project on a package of code you don't control?

Yes, certainly. I think this is sane because with OSS you can control it if you need to. Until then use what exists. It’s sane to use Linux in my project even though I don’t control that. I suppose it’s also sane to use Windows even though I don’t control that.

So you just leave Windows update on in production?

Brave man.

Depending on something doesn’t mean crazy. I depend on lots of OSS projects (and windows), but I have a management system where I control what gets updated and when.

You control what gets updated and when.

There we are.

His twitter page complaining that his github got locked-up suggests he cares. I am not unsympathetic, but only because, I am starting to see this more as an effort to undermine open source as a movement/cause.

Then again he seems quite proud of getting banned from Github in 2013 for "creating a script that forced people to watch a library that [he] created": https://youtu.be/varf6oWaFtU?t=202

Of course he acknowledged his reality:

"they can legally copy your Intellectual Property"

But let's be honest - if they hadn't copied his, they could have easily used the Ruby or Perl version. All he did was port a previous library.

what idea?

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27252066

still confused faker.js is in no way an original project, ruby faker is 4 years older than faker.js and I doubt it's the oldest.

Ruby version was based on the Perl version, and this author acknowledged his was based on those 2 versions (from the previous version's README):

    faker.js was inspired by and has used data definitions from:

    https://github.com/stympy/faker/ - Copyright (c) 2007-2010 Benjamin Curtis
    http://search.cpan.org/~jasonk/Data-Faker-0.07/ - Copyright 2004-2005 by Jason Kohles

so what was stolen exactly?

The Perl package is GPL. He took definitions from it, ported them to JS, and licensed them as MIT. "Is license violation theft?" is one of those questions like "Is piracy theft?", but it does undermine his insistence that he should be allowed commercialise the result.

It depends on whether you think copying a list of constants from what is essentially an “API” is copyright infringement.

It’s a contentious topic, but last I heard people here tend to believe it isn’t (as long as it’s Google copying Oracle’s stuff)

Those sound like two distinct things to me:

- Copying an interface for the purpose of providing a compatible implementation (what Google allegedly did - although of course part of the debate is whether they also copied any of the implementation)

- Copying parts of the implementation, not for the purpose of compatibility (what faker.js did - in this case, copying constants)

IIRC US copyright law gives very little protection to compilation of non-copyrightable data (look up copyright status of telephone directories). The argument is that it's just public domain factual information bundled together.

The faker libraries are all that -- compilations of mostly non-copyrightable facts.

I'm not saying faker.js did no wrong, just saying if hypothetically a purported copyright owner sued him, they would have a really hard time proving substantial infringement happened given the available precedents.