I keep thinking about this event and it seems like a fractal of bizarre phenomena. The act of stripping git history and attribution while forking is itself malicious, but then aggressively creating pull requests across major projects to use the new version and rack up your download count (???), then picking petty fights with the creator of the original over attribution (????), and the fanbase (?????) of the forker dogpiling the original creator (??????) is... what? I struggle to attribute these to normal, healthy motivations. Something is very, very wrong with the JS Open Source community if naked clout chasing like this is not only tolerated but also rewarded with fans!
The absolutely crazy thing is the person who caused this doesn't even think they did anything wrong: https://github.com/babel/babel/pull/13783#issuecomment-92724...
And there are people supporting their position.
I think because JS is such a large tent, there are folks not familiar with licenses and general norms in this space. I don't think it's something that being reasonable and pointing things out wouldn't fix.
As an aside I'm now extremely uncomfortable if I find any of ai's work as a transitive dependency for my company's own work because of their attitude towards adhering to licenses.
> I think because JS is such a large tent, there are folks not familiar with licenses and general norms in this space.
It's worth pointing out that this is all about a bunch of packages that decorate strings with ANSI colour escape sequences... I'm not saying it's worthless, or that there is nothing wrong in principle - but it's a lot of noise over something easily replicable from scratch - something simple enough that you may even choose to not bother with a library, (i've always just used ANSI codes directly in JS command line tools, sometimes defined in a few constants and interpolated for readability).
So perhaps the reason why one author is so pissed at misattribution, and the other allegedly doesn't seem to care much about it, is explained by a large difference in perceived value of the code.
To make my point more potent, imagine it was the same debacle over one of the many infamous one line NPM packages like "is-odd" which currently has half a million downloads per day and ultimately consists of the code "return (n % 2) === 1;"... excluding all of the fluff, and even with some unnecessary parenthesis.
I thought it was a joke your is-odd comment. But no it is at version 3.0.1 and has 2.1 million downloads a month[0]... And it has a dependency to is-number. With the performance of today's tree shaking systems I wonder why there is not a simple math lib.
This [0] might be what you are looking for, it has both is-number and is-odd.