[serf]

>Also, Kik turn out to be negligent and pretty scummy.

turns out?

they threatened a pre-existing naming collision with legal action and bullied the platform first into forcing the name to be theirs, and then afterwards by crying to npm until their software tests passed again.

they began scummy.

[bartread]

Yeah, but this also happened to a colleague of mine who created the pug templating package. It's so long ago now that I forget what it was originally called but, basically, he'd chosen a name that infringed somebody else's trademark. I'm not a trademark law expert but the thing about trademarks is they have to be defended or the holder can lose the exclusivity of the mark.

So my friend sensibly caved in and changed the name of the package, got on with his life, and now it's all long forgotten history.

Going back to Kik, before I knew about all the other stuff (which I only found out about when I listened to that Darknet Diaries episode last year - bit late to the party there) I simply thought they'd gone about defending their trademark in a hamfisted and douchey way that had got Azer's back up. Lawyer's gonna lawyer, and the way they did it I thought they were douchebags, but beyond that I didn't give it much consideration. There was certainly no way any of this even hinted to me that they were negligently facilitating the distribution of child porn[0].

[0] Yes, this is obviously against Kik's ToS, but ToS are only worth anything if they're enforced whereas - certainly at times prior to the Darknet Diaries episode being released in 2021 - there was at best inconsistent and ineffective enforcement of these terms. I have no insight into the current situation with Kik.

[balamatom]

>pug templating package. It's so long ago now that I forget what it was originally called

jade, iirc. still best html/xml/etc templating package out there, jsx/tsx can't compare

[bartread]

Yes! Thank you! That was it. I still use pug in a side project because it works really well and would just be way too much hassle to untangle and migrate.

I just looked jade up on npm and it's still there, so the company that wanted Forbes to change the name didn't even want to publish a package by the looks of it.