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.

Judging by the fork author's name, should've asked them in russian :-/

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Does he remind you of anyone?

https://www.wired.com/story/jia-tan-xz-backdoor/

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.

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