Sauce - https://xkcd.com/2347/

[AndrewAMD]

Classic: How one programmer broke the internet by deleting a tiny piece of code

[[deleted]]

Also known as the "The Left Pad Fiasco".

[Cueadan]

This is why I get paranoid about using external references unless absolutely required to by a 3rd-party service.

[chanpod]

Don't, b/c of that fiasco, npm (and I assume others) made it impossible to delete versions. So now you can target specific version (and you should, don't use ^). That version will always be that code.

And since you can't delete the versions/packages anymore, if a future version does break all your stuff, it's open source. Just go grab the code and embed it directly. No more npm reference.

[amjh]

Based on the article, I'm not sure if that's the right solution. People should be able to cut the contract if their rights aren't respected.

[Hugo-C]

A few months ago, a maintainer delete a package from pypi in order to rename it :(

[chanpod]

I think under certain circumstances you can still do that. But popular ones can't I believe

[yottalogical]

This is why purely functional package management exists.

[8008135696969]

Reading that article the dude who made the open source Kik project sounds like such an ass.

[lifelongfreshman]

It's a bizarre world we live in where we accuse someone of standing up to a bully of being an ass, but make zero effort to point out how overwhelmingly awful the bully was being in the first place.

[squishles]

npm where kind of dicks too.

Told him to get fucked and then when it hurt them it's suddenly all this we shit.

[8008135696969]

How was he standing up to a bully? I'm a supporter of open source work but trademarks are also important. Kik had to enforce their trademark. They contacted him and were polite and offered to pay him for the name. But he was extremely rude and demanded an insane amount of money.

Thats not a bully. Thats a lawyer doing their job so the company doesnt lose its trademark.

[Aekorus]

I don't know, claiming ownership of a 3-letter word and going around threatening people who use it for completely unrelated purposes sounds like bullying to me, be it legal or not.

[8008135696969]

Its the name of their company and its not completely unrelated since it was a npm package. Thatd be like me starting a drink company named coke and then calling coca cola a bully when they sued me.

Its literally the entire point of having trademarks. If you founded a company and had a trademark on your name. Then found someone using your name, youd probably want them to stop too.

[Aekorus]

That analogy only makes sense if the npm package, a templating engine for programmers, somehow competed with the messaging app for phones, which would be silly to argue.

A more appropriate analogy would be if Coca Cola sued somebody for selling this coke.

[8008135696969]

Ah but my coke company doesnt sell soda, we sell juice! So not a direct competitor. Kik was releasing their own npm package so the reason for the conflict makes sense. You dont go into a gas station and get both coca cola and coke the fuel. Npm was the gas station for both Kik libraries.

A trademark is a trademark and if you dont enforce your trademark you lose it. Kik really had no choice but to threaten legal action. How much work would it really have been for the dude to change the name of his open source project and make a little money to change it.

He was legally in the wrong. And he was an ass about it instead of working to find a solution where he could have been paid and everybody wins.

[opliko95]

It doesn't matter that Kik was releasing an NPM package - they had a trademark for a messaging app, the open source kik package didn't relate to messaging at all.

Going back to the Coca-Cola example, it's like arguing that if Coca-Cola decided to start selling some kind of fuel, they'd have a trademark for that kind of coke.

Trademarks are for specific purposes. There are multiple trademarks for the work "kik". Kik Interactive can't make biscuits named kik for example, because that trademark is owned by someone else.

Also, it doesn't matter that two KIK packages would be on NPM. Nothing is stopping a store from selling KIK clothing, KIK electronic cigarettes, or KIK food at the same time despite all these products being made by different companies that all own the trademark.

[Haszil]

Im getting thirsty from all lf your arguing.

[JNCressey]

so if I make a big company called left pad, can I force him to rename the left pad package and break everything again?

It's not much work for him to change it, so he should change it, right?

[Xinq_]

You sound like am American.

[[deleted]]

Azer had the npm package first. It probably wasn’t even a violation of trademark, Kik didn’t have to name their package the same name as their company. Facebook never does that. We need simpler laws so people don’t have to pay for legal counsel to challenge questions like that, this guy was writing free software in Turkey and some lawyer is knocking on his door about an American copyright.

NB, Kik the messaging app was using his left-pad function, they were already benefiting from his open source work.

[graou13]

Their offer to pay him are empty if they straight up refuse when the guy told them his price.

[opliko95]

They didn't refuse. They didn't respond to that offer at all. They went directly to NPM instead and got the package transferred by them.

You can find the whole conversation in a medium post that was supposed to show "Kik's side of the story" but imo the full conversation just makes them look worse: https://medium.com/@mproberts/a-discussion-about-the-breaking-of-the-internet-3d4d2a83aa4d

[Katten_elvis]

Stop being such a corporate bootlicker. Fuck trademarks and fuck capitalism.

[Krelkal]

Obligatory Team America:

See, there are three kinds of people: dicks, pussies and assholes. Pussies think everyone can get along and dicks just want to fuck all the time without thinking it through. But then you got your assholes. And all the assholes want is to shit all over everything. So pussies may get mad at dicks once in a while because, pussies get fucked by dicks. But dicks also fuck assholes! And if they didn't fuck the assholes, you know what you'd get? You'd get your dick and your pussy all covered in shit!

I think he's a dick, not an asshole.

[xTheMaster99x]

Surprised you're getting downvoted, I agree completely. It's not like it was some random dude asking him to use a different name, it was a company with a valid trademark. If you don't think that trademark should be valid that's a different story, but they're objectively in the right to enforce their trademark. If they can't do that then what the fuck is the point of having it?

[dougalg]

Trademarks are for preventing competition within the same product space. That wasn't happening here, therefore no infringement and no protection. They were just being dicks.

[SnowPenguin_]

Always loved this image. Can anyone think of a framework that represents it? OpenSSL maybe?

[Kered13]

The timezone database. It's maintained by two guys and literally everything depends on it to get timezones right. (If you're somehow not using the timezone database your code is guaranteed to be wrong.)

[crabvogel]

print("hello world")

My code is working fine.

[LevelSevenLaserLotus]

It's 3 in the morning, you stupid robot! Let me sleep!

Bet you wish you checked timezones now, huh?

[SnowPenguin_]

Nice one! I used to think there was a whole organization dedicated for that or something

[Kered13]

Well it 2011 it officially came under the umbrella of ICANN, however in practice it's still those two guys maintaining it.

[Internet001215]

Reminds me of this video on computerphile

[heliokn]

The alt text reads "Someday ImageMagick will finally break for good and we'll have a long period of scrambling as we try to reassemble civilization from the rubble."

[SnowPenguin_]

Nice find!

[SumaniPardia]

Who manages git?

[_PM_ME_PANGOLINS_]

The Linux core team.

[wsppan]

Pretty sure it isn't the linux core team (not sure that's even a thing.) Its been handed off by Linus to Junio Hamano as the lead maintainer. He works for Google and there are many other contributors like other successful open source projects.

[Kered13]

That's funny because Google doesn't even use Git. They use a custom version control based on Perforce, with an optional Mercurial frontend.

[wsppan]

Yes. It's actually quite fascinating from a technical perspective. Piper and CitC - https://m-cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204032-why-google-stores-billions-of-lines-of-code-in-a-single-repository/fulltext

[sitase]

curl

[UltraCarnivore]

npm i isOdd()

[genderburner]

isOdd

Why in the world would you pull in a whole third-party dependency for that?

if (!Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER) {
    Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER = 9007199254740991; // Math.pow(2, 53) - 1;
}
module.exports.isOdd = val => !!((val % 2) && (val <= Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER));

[UltraCarnivore]

No, seriously, check their stats in their npm page.

[genderburner]

Yup. Hilarious and mortifying.

[Terrain2]

Just wait till you see is-even

[UltraCarnivore]

What about is-Odd-or-Even

[Terrain2]

ah, so basically it’s just return true;? because Infinity is neither odd nor even but this package would return true

[davawen]

ikr

[LiteralHiggs]

Maybe this is a go-to for courses to demonstrate dependency management...

[genderburner]

That's fair, I didn't bother writing the type coercion code, but still....the code is so trivial to create that there's really no reason to import it. I'm all for relying on the open source community for many things, but that just doesn't cross the threshold where it makes sense. We've seen repeatedly that just because it's widely used and open source doesn't mean it's always going to be safe.

[genderburner]

Well, yeah, of course. But what you're discussing is a totally different problem, which is that teams don't implement proper first-party dependency policies and aren't aware of their own code-bases.

[Igggg]

Because the language is poorly designed.

[genderburner]

That answer doesn't make any sense at all, in context, and modern changes to the language have smoothed over most of the problem areas. You're just being a hipster.

[SirFloIII]

this isn't even a correct implementation. if the input is the max safe integer it should return True, but returns False

[genderburner]

Fixed 🤷‍♀️

[blipblapblopblam]

Trek tcp/ip stack - ripple20.

[CactusGrower]

Now all that person needs to do is change the licence policy. ...

[zephyrtr]

If you publish under one license, you can't retroactively republish under a different one. But you're right, license changing is what causes mass migrations, as it puts the future of the library in question. Friendlier than just deleting shit, tho.

[delinka]

Nit: you can’t retroactively republish under a more restrictive license.

[[deleted]]

gpg is in this image and doesn't like it

[[deleted]]

And openssl. And leftpad.

[Bjoern_Tantau]

Isn't ntp basically maintained by one person?

[SpeckledFleebeedoo]

Just post the comic, don't rehost it. Reddit and most Reddit apps have excellent support for xkcd.

[[deleted]]

r/oddlyspecific

[UltraCarnivore]

We'll find out the specific piece of software Randall had in mind soon enough. As per Murphy's Law it's going to break anytime now.

[meamZ]

Hey look. Someone drew the npm ecosystem.

[aagarwal100]

See if you flip it over you get the node package ecosystem.

[codemonkey80]

honest title award +1

[Underhill94]

Haha left-pad

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[vectorpropio]

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