[ants_everywhere]

The claims of AI use were unsubstantiated and pure conjecture, which was pointed out by people who understand language, including me. Now it appears that the community has used an MIT attribution violation to make the Zigbook author a victim of DMCA abuse.

That doesn't look great to me. It doesn't look like a community I would encourage others to participate in.

> tried to claim a namespace on open-vsx

It seems reasonable for the zigbook namespace to belong to the zigbook author. That's generally how the namespaces work right? https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Aeclipse%2Fopenvsx+namespa... https://github.com/eclipse/openvsx/wiki/Namespace-Access. IMO, this up there with the "but they were interested in crypto!" argument. The zigbook author was doing normal software engineer stuff, but somehow the community tries to twist it into something nefarious. The nefariousness is never stated because it's obviously absurd, but there's the clear attempt to imply wrongdoing. Unfortunately that just makes the community look as if they're trying hard to prosecute an innocent person in the court of public opinion.

> At a certain point, that starts to look outright malicious.

Malicious means "having the nature of or resulting from malice; deliberately harmful; spiteful". The Zig community looks malicious in this instance to me. Like you, I don't have complete information. But from the information I have the community response looked malicious, punitive, harassing and arguably defamatory. I don't think I've ever seen anything like it in any open source community.

Again, prior to the MIT attribution claim there was no evidence the author of Zigbook had done anything at all wrong. Among other things, there was no evidence they had lied about the use of AI. Malicious and erroneous accusations of AI use happen frequently these days, including here on HN.

Judging by the strength of the reaction, the flimsiness of the claims and the willingness to abuse legal force against the zigbook author, my hunch is that there is some other reason zigbook was controversial that isn't yet publicly known. Given the timing it possibly has to do with Anthropic's acquisition of Bun.

[latexr]

> The claims of AI use were unsubstantiated and pure conjecture

It seemed that way to me at the start too, but it quickly became apparent. Even the submitter thought so after going through the git history.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45952436

> It seems reasonable for the zigbook namespace to belong to the zigbook author. That's generally how the namespaces work right?

Yes. Bad actors try to give themselves legitimacy by acquiring as many domains and namespaces as quickly and as soon as they can with as little work as possible. The amount of domains they bought raised flags for me.

> IMO, this up there with the "but they were interested in crypto!" argument.

No idea what you’re talking about. Was the Zigbook author interested in cryptocurrency and criticised for it?

> The nefariousness is never stated because it's obviously absurd, but there's the clear attempt to imply wrongdoing.

That’s not true. It was stated repeatedly and explicitly.

https://zigtools.org/blog/zigbook-plagiarizing-playground/

Them stealing code, claiming it as their own, refusing to give attribution and editing third-party comments to make it seem the author is saying they are “autistic and sperging” is OK with you?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46095338

You really see nothing wrong with that and think criticising such behaviour is flimsy and absurd?

> I don't think I've ever seen anything like it in any open source community.

I’m certainly not excusing bad behaviour, but this wouldn’t even fall into the top 100 toxic behaviours in open-source. Plenty of examples online and submitted to HN over the years.

> Malicious and erroneous accusations of AI use happen frequently these days, including here on HN.

I know. I’m constantly arguing against it especially when I see someone using the em-dash as the sole argument. I initially pushed back against the flimsy claims in the Zigbook submission, but quickly the evidence started mounting and I retracted it.

> Given the timing it possibly has to do with Anthropic's acquisition of Bun.

I don’t buy it. The announcement of the acquisition happened after.

[ants_everywhere]

I think if you take a step back and try to fight against confirmation bias you'll see that the arguments you're making are very weak.

You are also moving the goal posts. You started with it was sketchy to claim a namespace now you're moving to it's sketchy to own domains. Of course people are going to buy variants on their domains.

This is easily in the top 5 most toxic moments in open source, and off the top of my head seems like #1. For all you know this is some kid in a country with a terrible job market trying to create a resource for the community and get their name out there. And the Zig community tried to ruin his life because they whipped themselves into a frenzy and convinced themselves there were secret signs that an AI might have been used at some point.

I've never seen an open source community gang up like that to bully someone based on absolutely no evidence of any wrong doing except forgetting to include an attribution for 22 lines of code. That's the sort of issue that happens all the time in open source and this is the first time I've seen it be used to try to really hurt someone and make them personally suffer. The intentional cruelty and the group of stronger people deliberately picking on a weaker person is what makes it far worse to me than the many other issues in open source of people behaving impolitely.

This is an in-group telling outsiders they're not welcome and, not only that, if we don't like you we'll hurt you.

And yes there have been repeated mentions of their interest in crypto, including in this thread.

[latexr]

> You are also moving the goal posts. You started with it was sketchy to claim a namespace now you're moving to it's sketchy to own domains.

Please don’t distort my words. That is a bad faith argument. I never claimed it was “sketchy to claim a namespace”, I listed the grievances other people made. That’s what “From what I remember (…) the complaint was” means. When I mentioned the domains, that was something which looked fishy to me. There’s no incongruence or goal post moving there. Please argue in good faith.

> For all you know this is some kid in a country with a terrible job market trying to create a resource for the community and get their name out there.

And for all you know, it’s not. Heck, for all I know it could be you. Either way it doesn’t excuse the bad behaviour, which is plenty and documented. All you have in defence is speculation which even if true wouldn’t justify anything.

You may not have seen this as I added the context after posting, so I’ll repeat it here:

> Them stealing code, claiming it as their own, refusing to give attribution and editing third-party comments to make it seem the author is saying they are “autistic and sperging” is OK with you?

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46095338

> You really see nothing wrong with that and think criticising such behaviour is flimsy and absurd?

Please answer that part. Is that OK with you? Do you think that is fine and excusable? Do you think that’s a prime example of someone “trying to create a resource for the community”? Is that not toxic behaviour?

Criticise the Zig community all you want, but pay attention to the person you’re so fervently defending too.