This reaction is normal, aletik could have been the next Jia Tan, for all we know, and could have distributed "fake notepad++ for Mac" binaries with backdoors in them to thousand of Mac users who think it is an officially n++-endorsed project when it is not, created by someone who is unknown.

Aletik can fork n++ and find a name for it, but can't use the brand and logo, and should be stopped by all means necessary if he does not comply ASAP. Tech bloggers should know better than to promote this without checking.

The disclaimer he put up on the website is comical. "In coordination with [original author], I will be _evolving the brand_ to …"

To me he sounds inexperienced/naive and a little scared (and thus “defensive”) but well-intentioned. His response makes me believe that he didn’t do it for fame, to deceive, or other selfish reasons.

    > The authors brazen reaction another

When I first read about the MacOS port from HN, I also assumed it was blessed by Don Ho. I was fooled by the new website. Now that I know it was not coordinated, it looks weird (even creepy/uncanny valley'ish) in hindsight, especially using all the same icons and branding, and including Don Ho on the author page.

That response doesn't seem brazen. It sounds like they had a deeply mistaken understanding of what an open source license grants and believed it would be fine to use the name and branding as well as the code. Unless I missed it, it sounds like they are changing how their site communicates its relationship to the original source.

What I find baffling about that conversation are the people having their LLMs weigh in on what the author should have done. Verbal takedown by LLM is a new level of cringe.

Edit: There are some replies I hadn't seen, their confusion and request for patience sounds like they still don't fully appreciate their mistake.

AI means never having to ask permission. Or forgiveness, it seems.

What's amazing to me is how I was downvoted into oblivion on a few different subreddits and forums for expressing concern about the vibe-coded nature of the project and that the author of the Mac port appeared to be using the Notepad++ name/branding without any official blessing from the project.

> I wanted is to bring Notepad++ to mac and allow people to find Mac version of Notepad++ quickly and use it.

Seems he’s ignorant of the ecosystem too (or possibly disingenuous, or maybe doesn’t realise he’s done something wrong or why). Notepad++ runs perfectly on macOS under Wine. I’ve been using it that way for two or three years now. Wasn’t a struggle to set up either: I simply ran the installer as if I was running Windows and then it #justworked.

"I will give you one week to change the name."

"No, I'm not going to do that."

"Okay fine, I'll report you to Cloudflare now."

"BROOOOOOOO you said you'd give me a week?!?!"

Honestly, the dude has added a disclaimer and agreed to change the name/logo/etc, giving the poor guy a few days to come up with a new name and register the URL doesn't seem a lot to ask. The dogpiling in that thread now seems especially unnecessary.

Oh what the hell. This is the vibe coder mentality. Grift, as far as it goes