First you wrote a rant that promptly got flagged before I even had to read it... now you're putting words I didn't say into my mouth.
Are you just incapable of having a mature conversation about this subject?
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It's becoming a little clearer what kind of mentality it takes to defend how the creator of colors handled this situation. Some of us are able to both:
- understand the frustration of feeling your work is unappreciated.
- realize there are better ways to show frustration than proverbially flipping over the table.
I mean I've literally defended this guy, Marak, before on this website, when people tried to jump to conclusions about his alleged 'bomb making'
But this is ridiculous. It's gone past compensation even, he's ranting about GamerGate and stuff and using broken packages to make political statements.
That's not a mature or effective way to do anything except yes... get yourself banned from multiple platforms for breaking the ToS you signed up for in the first place and leveraged to even get the kind of reach you have.
Plenty of SaaS providers end up using GPL code as if it was MIT since no distribution = no virality.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
If you go by the spirit of things tanking a package and Github/MS/npm taking over to undo that is fair game. Even if it's not literally a virus, obviously damaging basic functionality to make a statement is not a sustainable practice for NPM to continue functioning
If you want to go by the letter and what legal rights someone has:
https://docs.npmjs.com/policies/conduct
> The Service administrators reserve the right to make judgment calls about what is and isn't appropriate in published packages, package names, user and organization names, and other public content. Package that violates the npm Service's Acceptable Use rules including its Acceptable Content rules will be deleted, at the discretion of npm.
https://docs.npmjs.com/policies/open-source-terms
> Your Content belongs to you. You decide whether and how to license it. But at a minimum, you license npm to provide Your Content to users of npm Services when you share Your Content. That special license allows npm to copy, publish, and analyze Your Content, and to share its analyses with others. npm may run computer code in Your Content to analyze it, but npm's special license alone does not give npm the right to run code for its functionality in npm products or services.
> When Your Content is removed from npm Services, whether by you or npm, npm's special license ends when the last copy disappears from npm's backups, caches, and other systems. *Other licenses, such as open source licenses, may continue after Your Content is removed. Those licenses may give others, or npm itself, the right to share Your Content with npm Services again.*
https://github.com/Marak/colors.js/blob/master/LICENSE
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Seriously, why are people so adamant about defending this? We're all part of a giant ecosystem that relies on everyone being "a freeloading dick" in your eyes. Colors wouldn't have its audience without its creator being a "freeloading dick" and expecting NPM to serve it millions of times for free. NPM relies on a JS ecosystem propped up by "freeloading dicks".
"Freeloading dick" is such a dumb characterization of what it really is: Expecting FOSS creators and maintainers to be somewhat cognizant of the ecosystem past the tip of their nose.