I personally know Ivan. For many years of his life, every day, he programmed algorithm after algorithm in this complex online photo editing tool. Essentially, he devoted half his life to it. And now, when someone has literally stolen his work, nobody is reacting. And that's terrible. I think it's absolutely terrible. GitHub should respond to this.

I've seen people on Reddit writing things like, "Come on, what's the big deal? AI can write any code now." I disagree. There are hundreds of thousands of lines of code here, very complex code, which even AI wouldn't be able to write on the first try or in a single day. So this person stole this code from Photopea and built a product on top of it.

This is a very old problem. One of my first commercial programs was a wordpress plugin and as you know, you just distribute the PHP source code in a zip file and there it is

You will never sue your way out of this. Piracy will always exist. GitHub will respond to a legal notice but whack a mole is the game and legal notices cost money

The solution in the WP community at the time was variations of the plugin as a loss leader to get revenue with support or to leverage community visibility into larger contracts for work or hosting the platform for others.

If your business model depends on your code being a secret, JavaScript is not a good play. The business model needs to enhance what the code offers since it’s basically a commodity now

I agree. It's so disheartening to hear Ivan in interviews talking with passion about what he built. And it's truly impressive!

But wow, how do you stand a chance in stopping anyone when your code is all there freely available in the browser

> AI can write any code now.

Because it is trained on code of people like Ivan

Do you have the same stance on using adblockers when browsing the web?

AI did this to every developer in the world and nobody cares. This just confirms to me that software engineers are the biggest cucks that exist right now.

Copying isn’t stealing. We settled this in the 90s.