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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.

> Tech bloggers should know better than to promote this without checking.

Agreed, and it also seems unlikely this will be their takeaway. They now get to report on the drama which will probably get more clicks.

"The author" in above comment refers to the author of the port. So, yes, thats what they meant.
>Tech bloggers should know better than to promote this without checking.

Tech bloggers are just LLMs these days

Those very bad takes to push to merge a completely new codebase into Notepad++ project very much seems like a Jia Tan event. However, it’s probably not, because how bad they are. Nobody will be convinced with something like this, ever. One for sure, they don’t seem organic at all. They look like exactly how controlled political discourses are. Either there is a hit piece somewhere, or the comments are not genuine at all.
If you compiled notepad++ for Mac how should you make it available on the internet so people with Macs can download notepad++? Don't tell me you have to call it something else because that's absolutely insane, even if the law agrees.
The issue is by calling it Notepad++, you're now confusing users into thinking it's officially endorsed. Which means complaints, feature requests, bugs, and even any backdoors/malware included in the unofficial version tarnishes the reputation of the official product.

This is why trademarks exist.

> If you compiled notepad++ for Mac

That's not what happened:

- there's a lot of UI code, so it's not a mere distribution for Mac, not even sure it qualifies as a port at this point

- also, the authors page states Letov as the first author

It's in fact a fork. And unless the original author is ok with that, you shouldn't advertise your fork under the original name.

The disclaimer he put up on the website is comical. "In coordination with [original author], I will be _evolving the brand_ to …"
I honestly chuckled reading this “in coordination” comment.

Imagine being slapped across the face, and instead of saying you were slapped, you say…”in coordination with the back of their left hand”.

This entire thread actually makes me so angry for the N++ team. He was being so kind in his wording and was clearly being taken advantage of.

“I’m in NYC you have my WhatsApp” wtf does that even mean…you eat chopped cheese and have a cell phone?

A charitable interpretation is that the author is very young, by my estimate of how they write and their confusion of how accountability works it’s probably a middle-schooled kid first dipping their toes into software.
Smells like AI slop past its expiration date, to be honest.
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.
He was told by the original author to not use the name for his project 5 days ago. 3 days ago he wrote "Guys, all I wanted to do is to make Notepad++ available on mac and keep it open and free. I'm talking to Don. I really hope he will be ok with the name. It actually expands notepad++ brand to mac."

Already ignoring the authors wishes. He said clearly it is not OK and wants the name changed. That's it - but he keeps ignoring it.

I fail to see good intentions here.

First step would be taking down the website, second step is an apology, third step is bringing back online with new branding and eventually a final word to thank them, share the link and say they remain open to criticism.

It's not rocket science. Pretty sure even his LLM would give that strategy and implement it without burning too many tokens.

More than inexperienced, either he really can't read a room or he knows very well what he is doing.

I don't believe that he is naive. It looks like he wants to use the Notepad++ brand authority to capture the notepad++ macos market (which is big!) Thus he is infringing on a trademark for his own benefit.
A malicious actor would be happy to be publicly labeled inexperienced/naive.
I don't wanna be rude but it looks like this guy just arrived on the Internet this year - around March-April and it doesn't seem like he has any prior activity. He just decided to roll this Notepad++ for macOS and that's it

Also, his medium avatar looks awfully generated.

Naive my ass.

From the fork's authors page

> Andrey Letov is a New York product leader and software engineer.

And then a long list of professional achievements follows.

He knows exactly what he's doing

Product manager in software for 10 years. I cannot believe the inexperienced defense.
> I've shipped fintech and risk products at Moody's, BNY, AxiomSL, Amex and many more. I've built platforms, designed user experiences, assembled portfolio analytics and worked on professional services teams.

No inexperience here. It is malice

To me it seems like a "idgaf" mentality, and trying to get as much and push as far as he can. Never in his replies he shows any sign of admitting that he should not have put the notepad++ name like this, that it looked like an actual endorsement and this was wrong. He just finally (after putting repeated pressure) accepts to change the branding. I don't understand why some people like him do that and how.

I assume it is the "fake it till you make it" mentality, like "fake the endorsement until they actually endorse your project". Clearly doesn't work like this, but if this mentality has gotten you far, why not try it here too?

You can be inexperienced and naive, and at the same time understand when you make a mistake. Being "inexperienced" because you actively refuse to learn from what people tell you that you do wrong is not inexperience anymore.

The smarmy dishonesty about "expanding the Notepad++ brand" actually is selfish and ill-intentioned. Perhaps he is too young and naive to fully understand that he is being parasitic. But naivety is a well-travelled path towards malice.

Regardless, he absolutely deserves to be shamed on GitHub for this. I don't like the online culture of public shame and sandbagging - I think this GitHub thread should be closed now that it's viral - but sometimes people actually do things they should be ashamed of. This needs to be a tough lesson.

All of his responses are moronic misreadings of NP++'s actual author's comments, which lead me to believe that he is acting entirely in bad faith.
> His response makes me believe …

I’d pay more attention to his behavior.

the road to hell is paved with good intentions

    > The authors brazen reaction another
I want to clarify. Are you implying that Don Ho (donho) or Andrey Letov (aletik) is having the "brazen reaction"? From your link, I found aletik's first comment here: https://github.com/notepad-plus-plus/notepad-plus-plus/issue...

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.

The brazen part is Andrey Letov pretending to not understand.
In case anyone else was confused. The author of this fork replied to some trademark discussion with a “fuck trademarks” response. He edited/deleted it but you can still see it in some of the quoted replies.

Fork author is either a young kid or clueless.

The only place I see that is from a user "LiEnby" not "aletik", and none of aletik's existing messages are edited. All replies I see with the message are also to LiEnby. I don't agree with aletik's slow response in any way, but I don't think your claim is correct either. Do you have anything to prove that this was said by aletik?
It was not him as far as I can tell. It was this guy: https://github.com/nukeop that showed examples of the trademark law being stupid sometimes, and this guy: https://github.com/LiEnby that said "fuck trademarks"

The author of the "rewrite" didn't seem to say this

Or a tech founder (gestures at Ubercab)
AI means never having to ask permission. Or forgiveness, it seems.
See all you do is take the repo and put it into the AI and then ask the AI to regenerate it to another directory. Et Voila the AI generated it and the person didn't do anything illegal.

Okay that might not be okay. So you take screen shots, release notes and feed that to the AI. Now it's fine.

Even better is if you can get the data trained into the model! Because then it's totally different right?

1 shotting companies is the future and that's why so many companies are accelerating ai by giving all their code and plans to the leading ai providers for money.

Asking? Inessential!
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.

It sounds brazen and incredibly entitled. The LLM response seems fitting for a vibe coded project with a vibe brain author.
I am on the fence about using an LLM to respond to situations like this, particularly if it is a screenshot and it is obvious what they are doing.

It is snarky and cringe, but also goes to show how poorly the decision making is by the author that even an LLM is pointing out how badly you are handling this.

Especially when this is clearly a vibe coded project.

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.
There's a lot of people even in here who don't seem to get it, who call it a "simple" task to do the port and are confused why this is a bad thing at all. A lot of people in the industry (and perhaps everywhere) have a hard time with ethics and doing the right thing.
> 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.

Indeed, and in general. Popular, well supported open source project around for decades not available in POSIX, somehow?

In Linux, the only things I don't have with Wine are whatever the other clipboard is that highlighting text gets filled with and access to network shares. Such nothingburgers that I've never spent real time to figure out if there's a solution.

"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?!?!"

It looks like it went more like this:

"Stop using my trademark." [1]

"OK, give me a couple of weeks. I was intending to expand your brand." [2]

"No. I've reported this to your CDN." [3]

---

[1]: This is the correct way to handle things.

[2]: This has the appearance of being evidence of -deliberate- fuckery.

[3]: This kind of action is the inevitable result of deliberate fuckery.

We have found the limits of agentic engineering. Changing a logo on a website apparently takes weeks.
Funny how the vibe-coding speed grinds to 0 the moment people catch on to their bullshit. A name change requires a week but shitting out 200 commits with Claude takes barely a month.
Oh what the hell. This is the vibe coder mentality. Grift, as far as it goes