[thebeastie]

It feels vaguely on topic for me to speak about something that happened to me regarding an open source project I made.

It was the one time that a project of mine generated a bit of buzz on HN. But I hadn’t posted it myself, someone else did. But they posted a link to a fork, which no changes of their own, claiming that someone else had posted it. The fork got 30 ish stars and follows, and nobody in the HN thread pointed out that they were starring a fork with no changes.

This really sucked, since I would have liked to develop an open source project that had users, but this was my project and now I had to negotiate with some other guy I didn’t know who had probably just taken the credit for my work. It didn’t work out.

Anyone else had this happen to them? What’s a constructive way to deal with that?

[ls15]

> What’s a constructive way to deal with that?

"Hey, I am the original author of this. AMA."

[bruce511]

Yeah, this. You could be the one to point out the fork in the thread. Don't wait for someone else to do it.

"this is a fork of xxx, I'm looking forward to seeing the community grow in this way. I'm the author of xxx, feel free to AMA, or reach out. Any participation in the project is welcome and encouraged."

[toast0]

If the fork is using github, there's going to be lots of trails back to your project. Especially if you continue to update, and they don't, it'll show this branch is 30 commits behind your branch, etc... That's often a good indicator that I should check out your branch... even if the fork got better PR.

The suggestion to do an AMA in the post seems pretty decent too.

[fuzzythinker]

If you care for that, then why aren't you filling out your HN profile?

[thebeastie]

I’m not the type to self promote much, plus, a lot of bad experiences in the industry (due to maverick type behavior), so filling out profiles seems like a waste of time.

But, I’ll have to come out of hiding soon enough, have spent the last year+ developing a pretty unusual project. Actually I’m sure I should have been blogging about it already. But it’s hard for me to have positive expectations, and I know that alot of what I have to say is going to be divisive.

Now that I saw the first replies to my comment, I realize that I wasn’t really seeing the big picture in that moment, someone can’t really steal your open source project, the thing to do would have been to mention it in the thread and then just keep on developing it as I had been. Anyone who wanted to use it would eventually realize that the fork wasn’t where the action was at.

Truth is there is some kind of trauma at play, and actually there is for a lot of people, but trauma is still a bad word, we don’t really talk about it on HN, actually a lot of conversation in tech has been sterilized, the mindshare is highly sought after.

[fuzzythinker]

Sorry to hear about your bad experiences. For me, filling out HN profile isn't about self promotion. It's about enabling like-minded folks on HN to reach out to me if they want to. If I don't do that, it creates an extremely big hurdle for people to do that since I'm not on any social networks.

p.s. Will refresh your profile a few more times.