To me he sounds inexperienced/naive and a little scared (and thus “defensive”) but well-intentioned. His response makes me believe that he didn’t do it for fame, to deceive, or other selfish reasons.
To me he sounds inexperienced/naive and a little scared (and thus “defensive”) but well-intentioned. His response makes me believe that he didn’t do it for fame, to deceive, or other selfish reasons.
He was told by the original author to not use the name for his project 5 days ago. 3 days ago he wrote "Guys, all I wanted to do is to make Notepad++ available on mac and keep it open and free. I'm talking to Don. I really hope he will be ok with the name. It actually expands notepad++ brand to mac."
Already ignoring the authors wishes. He said clearly it is not OK and wants the name changed. That's it - but he keeps ignoring it.
I fail to see good intentions here.
Yeah. And if you want to expand an existing brand that's not yours, you ask first, and only continue after a green light from the owner.
Well, that part might be temporarily excused by naivety. But he did ask, was not replied to - and he did it anyway. So I actually do not believe in naivety. And now it is past that point anyway.
You mean asking for forgiveness is easier than asking for permission is not a valid way to walk through life?
In general really no, but I do see the point in not asking for permission for everything to get anything done. (I am german, here the saying is, anything not explicitely allowed is forbidden and there is no fun in this)
But I hate the stance when people do it, when it is clear that no permission will be given. To establish facts on the ground so to say.
(But there are exceptions where I think it is legit)
Judging by the fork author's name, should've asked them in russian :-/
First step would be taking down the website, second step is an apology, third step is bringing back online with new branding and eventually a final word to thank them, share the link and say they remain open to criticism.
It's not rocket science. Pretty sure even his LLM would give that strategy and implement it without burning too many tokens.
More than inexperienced, either he really can't read a room or he knows very well what he is doing.
Right? Instead we get:
- Saying he's hoping Don allows it
- "I actually did nothing wrong"
- "I actually did nothing wrong" part 2
- "I actually did nothing wrong" part 3
- Why are you so mad? Give me a week
- Why are you so mad? I added more lies to the website
- Why are you so mad? I'm working on it
... over the course of 2 days. Shutting down the website and pulling the app offline should have taken minutes.
People react differently to feedback without necessarily bad intentions. Not everyone is ready to instantly admit mistakes. Empathy goes a long way.
Reading the above, how much empathy does someone need to give before they can feel the other party has bad intentions?
"No" needs to mean something.
It’s not either-or. You can tell people No and be empathetic to their reasons at the same time. Understanding doesn’t mean agreement or acceptance. It also doesn’t mean you excuse their behavior, or allow it to continue. Empathy doesn’t mean you like what they’re doing. That would be sympathy.
In fact, understanding makes it easier to get people to do what you want.
Some argue that it is even a precondition, to meet someone where they are, to get them to change their ways. The other remaining option is violence/force, which will not fundamentally change their behavior but only shift the problematic behavior elsewhere (and often make it worse).
> It’s not either-or. You can tell people No and be empathetic to their reasons at the same time. Understanding doesn’t mean agreement or acceptance. It also doesn’t mean you excuse their behavior, or allow it to continue. Empathy doesn’t mean you like what they’re doing. That would be sympathy.
We're talking about a discussion in which the author continues their violations after being told "no", and excuses it with their "reasons".
Their reasons can come after they stop the actual wrongdoing, and maybe after they understand what they did wrong and apologize for it.
We all agree that that would be tactful. But, human empathy is neither an act of excusing the subject of the empathy, nor limited to tactful subjects.
Asking someone to empathize with their persecutor while they are actively harming that someone is generally viewed as abusive gaslighting in most other contexts.
Would you ask physical abuse victims to be empathetic towards their abusers in the middle of a beating, too? What if they were told it hurt, and asked to stop, and they instead continued anyways while repeatedly and politely saying they had good intentions in beating the victim?
If someone was being physically abused, I'd like to think that I'd try to step in. What value do you see in this comparison?
Why limit that protective instinct to physical abuse?
What we see in the thread is people doing what you're talking about: trying to step in to stop abuse. The fact that it isn't a beating doesn't mean it isn't abuse.
I'm not limiting outward action. I'm making a case for additional inward action: empathy.
Edit: I think you're mistaking empathy with passivity.
I saw plenty of empathy in the discussion for the slop-copy author.
I also saw plenty of empathy in the discussion for Don Ho.
There was probably more of the second than the first, which makes sense, as the victim deserves more empathy than the perpetrator, especially while the perpetrator continues to victimize others.
Gaslighting in its original sense is a continued process of abuse that leads to a person doubting their own perception, typically with a long term PTSD as consequence. What we are discussing here are possible strategies to get somebody to change their behavior. If you consider people stating a different opinion than you to be gaslighting you, you might want to dig deeper.
I think what is happening here is a difference in understanding of what we mean by empathy, and what it entails in terms of visible action or response. I tried to make it clear that to me, you can both be understanding of the feelings and the (ir)rationality of an abuser and be clear in your boundary-setting (and possible application of protective force) at the same time. The understanding of your “opponent” can help guide your interaction, whether it is verbal communication or other. It doesn’t mean “to be nice” in your response, or accepting their actions.
The reason why I advocate for “more empathy” is because I firmly believe it can make you more successful in clear boundary setting and in communicating and achieving your goals, not weaker, especially in situations where you strongly disagree with somebody else’s actions.
To come back to the case at hand: We seem to agree that the goal is to get him to stop and take the project down. The strategies employed so far to tell him No didn’t make him stop. Now what? I suggested to try a little empathy in the response, something along the lines of “Thank you for offering your help in making NP++ even more successful! We appreciate your effort. For now, can you please take it down, and then we can discuss how you can bring your strengths and abilities to the project in a way that causes less controversy in our happy little community? Looking forward to hearing about your ideas!”. (Only works if sufficiently true; adjust where necessary.)
The goal remains the same. Only the strategy is different. It doesn’t matter if I “like” the person or not, or if I “care” about them. I am interested in achieving my goals, and it requires their cooperation for that —- unless I want to sue. Which I don’t.
With your hypothetical domestic violence abuser, you can shout No all you want at some people and they just won’t stop. If your goal is to get them to stop, you CAN try different strategies. Empathy expands your range of possible actions; it doesn’t limit them.
> Gaslighting in its original sense is a continued process of abuse that leads to a person doubting their own perception
Yes, like the slop-author here adding gaslighting onto their continuing abuse here, using polite language and self-justification to mask that they are being abusive.
> The reason why I advocate for “more empathy” is because I firmly believe it can make you more successful in firm boundary setting and in communicating and achieving your goals
Don Ho tried that first, even encouraging forks under a different name, yet the abuse still continues. Thus, the hypothesis did not hold true in this case. The other comments you see from victims about how the abuser is violating boundaries, are a direct consequence of the hypothesis being tried and failing here.
Not that it will always fail: it's probably a good idea in general. It just didn't work here. It is an unfortunate fact of life that there exist personalities in this world who simply ignore "no" or "stop hurting me" when it conflicts with their own desires. No amount of empathy will make these people immediately stop.
I did not challenge or question Don Ho’s attempts. I attribute the person’s defensive responses as reaction to other people’s displayed lack of empathy, including some posters here, not Don’s. In fact, when you scroll back you will find that I merely shared my opinion, and then continued to expand on it further to provide more information on why I have that opinion. I don’t need you to agree with me. Often, I expand on my opinions more as a service to other readers, who may still be interested in reading about them.
I don’t share the analysis that it didn’t work; it didn’t work so far; the story is live and still unfolding.
His defensive responses we can set aside for a moment. Even if we ignore those, we see him acting abusively: refusing to get consent; refusing to accept "no", from the very beginning.
> I don’t share the analysis that it didn’t work; it didn’t work so far; the story is live and still unfolding.
I think that Don would, and speaking objectively, we can see that it did not achieve the objective of immediately ceasing violations (potentially including, but not limited to, temporarily taking the site offline while further discussions are had). The immediacy is an inherent part of the objective. A solution that takes days, much less weeks, before the abuse stops, is an inadequate remedy here, and that has been explained to the abuser.
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altek has been given a number of off-ramps and alternatives to proceed. His continued resistance to take those isn't a sign of naivete, it's a sign of bad faith.
I don't believe that he is naive. It looks like he wants to use the Notepad++ brand authority to capture the notepad++ macos market (which is big!) Thus he is infringing on a trademark for his own benefit.
> capture the notepad++ macos market
Is it big?
Notepad++ is big in the Windows world but I am not certain that it is automatically big on Mac. They have much more Mac-native feeling editors like TextMate, Nova, Cot, even SublimeText feels more macOS-ishy than Notepad++
I am on Linux, Notepad++ is not a name of concern on here at all and if it ever came to Linux most people wouldn't notice.
If you're in the Windows world that might seem like an improbability given how big it is there, but trust me, it's not a well known name anywhere else.
"I am on Linux, Notepad++ is not a name of concern on here at all and if it ever came to Linux most people wouldn't notice."
Strong disagree. The thing I miss in linux most is notepad++ or something as capable and usable (open for suggestions, but chances are I already tried them)
> I miss
There's the rub, I miss. Notepad++ is thoroughly a Windows app. Linux and Mac natives have no appetite for one of the most thoroughly Windows-ass Windows app around. Switchers, sure. But take me as an example. I've been on a Mac since 2007. At this point I'm a native. I'm not even aware of what Notepad++ really does.
Well, I am a "switcher" since 20 years, so rather OS agnostic. I regulaty switch between linux and windows (and chromeos) and sometimes mac and ideally I want all my apps to work the same, no matter the OS.
Notepadqq is a decent crack at a Notepad++ clone for Linux, but it is no longer actively maintained.
Thanks, I did not try out that one, though it being abandoned is of course not great.
Interesting. I'd have thought that Linux users would go traditional (vi vs. Emacs) or for something heavier (vscode), or quick and easy for when you just need $EDITOR (nano).
For some reasons I never liked vi nor emacs, vscode is indeed too heavy and nano too awkward. I use mostly xed, but it lacks compared to notepad++
Any pointers on what exactly you miss compared to Linux alternatives like Kate, Sublime, VSCode, etc? (Assuming you already tried them)
Sublime I like, but is proprietary (and there was something else). VScode is too heavy, kate as well. (But maybe with kate I just need to modify the key bindings so they match what I am used to, I only recently tried it out)
Basically, I want code folding(with option to collapse all the tree), macrorecording, search (replace) in files, but with all the goodies notepadd++ provides, where I can easily set the folder to search, what filepatterns to exclude etc.
Zed?
Always vim, never really understood why people use anything else for a dumb ide.
Ok, I might give it a try again. Funny thing: I googled "vim" and google replied with: "did you mean emacs?"
I have been using NotepadNext. Works fine.
I thought actual n++ worked well in WINE?
Not the last times I tried it, but it has been a while (but I did also recently read about problems .. and I need a text editor to work without problems)
It’s probably a few thousand users. When I switched to mac, I looked for notepad++ and settled on BBEdit (which is awesome and funny I forgot about it all these years).
This doesn’t seem like for money, but for esteem.
A shout out for BBEdit which is a 34 year old Mac native text editor that maintains a freemium license (and the free version is still quite featureful).
It doesn’t suck.®
I've maintained my copy of it from back in the MacOS 7.x days.
A malicious actor would be happy to be publicly labeled inexperienced/naive.
The inverse Hanlon's razor cuts much better than the original one these days:
Never attribute to stupidity (incompetence|naivety) that which is adequately explained by malice.
You don't need an inverse Hanlon's razor, that's the natural response and a recipe for a social dumpster fire.
That reasoning holds but it is not based on any of the facts at hand. There's a reason why any community worth being apart of has a tendency to assume good faith. People make mistakes. I respect Don Ho's response and I don't see how the pitchfork brigade is bringing anything valuable to the situation.
People are pissed because instead of taking the feedback, apologizing and acting immediately, he wrote comment after comment giving excuses. What he did is literally illegal, and ignorance or good intentions is not a solid excuse.
If you’d actually installed it and realized afterward that you’d been misled, whether by someone who doesn’t understand trademarks or someone acting in bad faith, you’d probably feel differently. Leaving a comment on HN in that situation is a pretty reasonable reaction.
This. A billion times this. The community should be shouting from the rooftops that there is an intruder in the neighborhood.
Maybe there's no malice intended and this is just a colossal pile of honest mistakes. Maybe this author is as clueless as he appears. Maybe, but until he appears at the United Nations and doxes himself before embarking on a world wide apology tour, nobody in their right mind should install that binary. I wouldn't even run the build script in a sandbox.
I don't wanna be rude but it looks like this guy just arrived on the Internet this year - around March-April and it doesn't seem like he has any prior activity. He just decided to roll this Notepad++ for macOS and that's it
Also, his medium avatar looks awfully generated.
It reads to me like English isn't his first language. Either way the complexities of open source licensing are something a lot of people don't understand.
As stated multiple times in the linked discussion: the licensing of the open source code is not the issue. It's the use of the trademark, and making their fork look like an officially endorsed one.
And the fork author was given a oppertunity to remediate without further drama. Instead, the fork author doubled down, where the possible reasons for that behavior are hard to interpret in good faith.
Yes, one of the complexities of open source licensing that people do not understand is that most copyright licenses assign only copyright and that copyright is a distinct and different concept than patents and trademarks.
Ironic this comment reads like you didn’t even grok the basics of the issue if you think open source licensing is the source of confusion.
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There's a term for making conclusions about someone based on their race.
1. It's not a race, make your terminology straight
2. I'm not even making a generalization. I'm pointing out an interesting fact in the context of blatant violation of internationally established behavioral norms, and even laws in sone jurisdictions
3. I'm offering you to make your own conclusion
So based on 1, 2, 3, you are welcome to gtfo.
No, you're simply being a bigoted ass.
I am not surprised that your comments are not dead, as it's been perfectly acceptable to insinuate various things about certain groups of people here, or even straight up write horrible things about them, based on nothing but their surface characteristics. As long as you're careful to avoid some "protected" groups, that is.
Even the tired excuse of "I am just asking questions" is there, slightly modified.
I consulted Jia Tan on his opinion of this situation, but he is yet to respond. In Mandarin Chinese, of course.
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Does he remind you of anyone?
https://www.wired.com/story/jia-tan-xz-backdoor/
> Also, his medium avatar looks awfully generated.
What do you mean by this? Aren’t most avatar images generated three days?
His linkedin (on which he posted about notepad++) is pretty light publicly but it does have a post about him speaking at a conference in NY on product management and people actually commenting that they saw his talk. That was a year ago, so definitely possible that there's some "setup an account to look real" BS going on but at first glance my take is that he's a real person.
The people on HN might be surprised by how little the average naive software-adjacent person knows about intellectual property law. I've been following it since I was 12, but most people barely know what a trademark is let alone what enforcement looks like.
Here's my guess: Eastern European origin, currently working and likely living in NY, PM gets ahold of Claude and decides to vibe code himself a port of Notepad++. Maybe he really has good intentions, maybe he is looking to make donation money, maybe a bit of both, whatever. Probably looking for donation money. Regardless, he thinks "Oh people fork/port open source projects all the time, I'll just do that" and has no conception whatsoever that he is going to piss people off OR that he's violating the law. English is not his first language either I'd bet, and he's using Claude to write a lot of / all of his comments. Acts frankly ignorant and confused and dumb in response, doesn't know what to do, etc. AI can't help him because he's not even givin the AI context well. A shitstorm ensues.
FWIW, I did a quick/not that advanced static analysis of the code compared to the published binaries and couldn't find anything malicious. I'd leave that to the experts though for any real opinion.
TLDR;; My guess: Dumb PM gone mad with power and looking for a donation-based cash grab, possibly with the good intention of keeping the project going long term, does not know the first thing about IP and does not speak english as his first language. But an actual dude.
We'll see how it shakes out.
The people on HN might be surprised by how little the average naive software-adjacent person knows about intellectual property law. I've been following it since I was 12, but most people barely know what a trademark is let alone what enforcement looks like.
I'm sorry, but I don't buy that (and on a quick incomplete read, the author is betting on getting exactly that sort of pass)? It's one thing to plumb the depths of interpretations of the GPL or do a detailed compare and contrast of one license versus another (agreed: nontrivial), but "hey yo! Ima gonna use the name and branding of someone elses very, very popular project and try and make some cash from it that'd be cool right?". No...sorry...I cannot suspend my disbelief to that extent.
Naive my ass.
From the fork's authors page
> Andrey Letov is a New York product leader and software engineer.
And then a long list of professional achievements follows.
He knows exactly what he's doing
Product manager in software for 10 years. I cannot believe the inexperienced defense.
To me it seems like a "idgaf" mentality, and trying to get as much and push as far as he can. Never in his replies he shows any sign of admitting that he should not have put the notepad++ name like this, that it looked like an actual endorsement and this was wrong. He just finally (after putting repeated pressure) accepts to change the branding. I don't understand why some people like him do that and how.
I assume it is the "fake it till you make it" mentality, like "fake the endorsement until they actually endorse your project". Clearly doesn't work like this, but if this mentality has gotten you far, why not try it here too?
You can be inexperienced and naive, and at the same time understand when you make a mistake. Being "inexperienced" because you actively refuse to learn from what people tell you that you do wrong is not inexperience anymore.
What LLMs have brought to our industry is exposure of how many people in it are total pieces of shit. You have the hucksters who are out there trying to get you to invest in their LLM startup and they constantly use language that is functionally lying about what their product is by likening what it does to actual functioning human brains and personalities. You have the fantasists who see a grammatically correct sentence as proof of omnipotence and then run around telling everyone how AI has totally changed everything. You have the posers who use LLMs to cut-n-paste code from other's repos, directly and indirectly, and then claim they wrote it and pretend to have skills and abilities they don't have. Then you have the ignoramuses in media and such who know nothing, they hear all the hucksters and fantasists jibber-jabbing and proceed to flood the world with untrue stories about AI and it's affects on society.
> I've shipped fintech and risk products at Moody's, BNY, AxiomSL, Amex and many more. I've built platforms, designed user experiences, assembled portfolio analytics and worked on professional services teams.
No inexperience here. It is malice
thats a lot of companies for a guy so young. Probably gets the boot a bunch.
All of his responses are moronic misreadings of NP++'s actual author's comments, which lead me to believe that he is acting entirely in bad faith.
> His response makes me believe …
I’d pay more attention to his behavior.
the road to hell is paved with good intentions
The smarmy dishonesty about "expanding the Notepad++ brand" actually is selfish and ill-intentioned. Perhaps he is too young and naive to fully understand that he is being parasitic. But naivety is a well-travelled path towards malice.
Regardless, he absolutely deserves to be shamed on GitHub for this. I don't like the online culture of public shame and sandbagging - I think this GitHub thread should be closed now that it's viral - but sometimes people actually do things they should be ashamed of. This needs to be a tough lesson.
I'm spamming this everywhere - taken from his blog:
> I've shipped fintech and risk products at Moody's, BNY, AxiomSL, Amex and many more. I've built platforms, designed user experiences, assembled portfolio analytics and worked on professional services teams.
Also' he's not young. Check his github avatar
You know, what's frustrating is that when I first contemptuously dismissed "Notepad++ for MacOS" as a trademark violation I did skim that stuff and accordingly just sort of assumed the port was technically legitimate, but disrespectful of copyright. But of course it was vibe-coded, and apparently chock full of stupid bugs that would have been caught with adequate manual testing. Why wouldn't I assume otherwise?
This from his website is pretty funny:
The first well-known software he vibe-coded is a buggy port of something a talented human spent many decades hand-crafting. The slop project is completely devoid of creativity or imagination, and it's going down in public flames because he was stupid about copyright. Kind of cartoonish, actually.The sad thing is that I expect this to rise as time passes. Most vibe-coders, from what I've seen, are exactly like this guy: they have no idea of trademark or copyright law and think that they can just... Do things like this without consequences. They will self-justify until they're blue in the face and not learn anything from it. There are, of course, exceptions to this generalization, but I don't know how significant said exceptions really are going to be to this.
It sounds like BS. Guy’s done it all if you believe his resume.
That's kinda the point. No matter if it's true or not, it puts him in bad light