Yes, but de facto is not de jure. Moreover, if you write something like
i had to do unholy things to make the original code work, seriously.
check the commit logs on github and you’ll see how much “code” i had to delete and refactor.
what’s left isnt really acceptable, but it does work.
and on the first comment in this post is
I think it’s really funny you still don’t quite grasp the reason why I ported this library.
You said, “He tried to say he did it for altruistic reasons, but FIGlet itself is open source, and there are already PHP modules available for people looking to use it in the browser (here and here).”.
That is just funny. Thanks a lot of the write up, this will give me some great SEO.
You are not really being "cool" about someone else's code, which you didn't ask for permission (which is de facto done, at least to say you have done so, if not to ask for permission).
Hmm, I guess my understanding of hacker norms, at least in the communities I've been in for some years, was that there was no particular requirement to ask permission before building derivative versions of stuff, and generally you should assume it's allowed and encouraged, though credit is appropriate (and generally more prominent credit than this asciimo site gave). There's a half-dozen or so Hacker News repackagings that never asked pg's permission before going live, for example (e.g. http://hacker-newspaper.gilesb.com/).
So I'd definitely agree credit was poorly given, and this guy's motives probably aren't good either, but "code theft" seems a bit silly. "Nobody can use my stuff without permission" seems sort of out of place in hacker culture. I mean, TAAG itself is built on reusing a bunch of other people's work.
This was not open source code. Would you expect to be allowed to download the GMail JavaScript code and use it to make your own webmail software?
Hacker culture is great, but that doesn't mean you can or should force everyone in the world to abide by its norms (or your perception of those norms).
There is quite a big difference between Gmail and a just for fun ascii art generator.
I could see this guy being upset if he wasn't given credit for it. But the new version gave credit to his original from the very start. Kind of a weird thing to get mad about.
>There is quite a big difference between Gmail and a just for fun ascii art generator.
No. There isn't. It's all someone's hard work and effort. Just because one belongs to google and one belongs to a fellow hacker doesn't make it OK to steal his work and get away with it.
You're right: This particular instance of plagiarism isn't such a big deal. The reason it's notable is that it shows just how little respect some people have. The guy took the creator's code without permission and altered it to insult the creator, then when the creator expressed unhappiness with this, he hit the creator's comment section with more insults and entitlement.
Maybe I've not been long enough in hacker comunities, but being rude when tacking the code is not exactly correct. I guess that if Marek had written just : Taken from blablabla and modified to work with blablabla Patorjk would be somewhat OK with it, but the way Marek did it... Don't know, it is being plain rude.
It is like hacker-newspaper came in and said PG's work is a lot of crap, removed some part of it and took credit. What do you think would happen?
He did actually make a bunch of negative comments when launching Hacker Newspaper, which is sort of interesting. He says he repackaged HN because HN's layout was crap, and its discussions were "ridiculous time-wasting garbage", so he wrote Hacker Newspaper, with a new layout and no comment threads, to "reach a higher level of information hygiene".
No, no, not necessarily. Follow HNN for a few months and you'll know about the archive-type and newsletter-type repackaging sites. I'm not behind any of them, and I know of them.
But your larger point, that Marak is a jerk - yeah, 100% agreed on that one.
The code is, yes, but repackaging the actual live site content is a bit iffier. From what I can tell, pg's never either explicitly blessed or objected to it--- he seems to benignly tolerate it (though I may have missed somewhere where he addresses it?).
