5/4/2026 at 10:05:20 AM
Using the trademark is one thing. The authors brazen reaction another: https://github.com/notepad-plus-plus/notepad-plus-plus/issue...by FinnKuhn
5/4/2026 at 11:22:25 AM
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.
by rpigab
5/4/2026 at 12:09:43 PM
"The author" in above comment refers to the author of the port. So, yes, thats what they meant.by PythagoRascal
5/4/2026 at 10:20:48 AM
The disclaimer he put up on the website is comical. "In coordination with [original author], I will be _evolving the brand_ to …"by f3408fh
5/4/2026 at 12:00:28 PM
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?
by testfrequency
5/4/2026 at 11:11:41 AM
Smells like AI slop past its expiration date, to be honest.by bayindirh
5/4/2026 at 11:27:52 AM
Maybe this is some weird attempt to see if malicious takeover with bots is possibleby pndy
5/4/2026 at 10:15:08 AM
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.by 47282847
5/4/2026 at 11:23:15 AM
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.
by lukan
5/4/2026 at 11:31:02 AM
Yeah. And if you want to expand an existing brand that's not yours, you ask first, and only continue after a green light from the owner.by emaro
5/4/2026 at 11:35:09 AM
Well, that part might be temporarily excused by naivety. But he did ask, was not replied to - and he did it anyway. So I actually do not believe in naivety. And now it is past that point anyway.by lukan
5/4/2026 at 10:22:18 AM
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.by AureliusMA
5/4/2026 at 11:18:29 AM
> capture the notepad++ macos marketIs it big?
Notepad++ is big in the Windows world but I am not certain that it is automatically big on Mac. They have much more Mac-native feeling editors like TextMate, Nova, Cot, even SublimeText feels more macOS-ishy than Notepad++
I am on Linux, Notepad++ is not a name of concern on here at all and if it ever came to Linux most people wouldn't notice.
If you're in the Windows world that might seem like an improbability given how big it is there, but trust me, it's not a well known name anywhere else.
by Matl
5/4/2026 at 12:17:57 PM
"I am on Linux, Notepad++ is not a name of concern on here at all and if it ever came to Linux most people wouldn't notice."Strong disagree. The thing I miss in linux most is notepad++ or something as capable and usable (open for suggestions, but chances are I already tried them)
by lukan
5/4/2026 at 10:44:27 AM
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.
by cryptonym
5/4/2026 at 11:10:35 AM
Right? Instead we get:- Saying he's hoping Don allows it
- "I actually did nothing wrong"
- "I actually did nothing wrong" part 2
- "I actually did nothing wrong" part 3
- Why are you so mad? Give me a week
- Why are you so mad? I added more lies to the website
- Why are you so mad? I'm working on it
... over the course of 2 days. Shutting down the website and pulling the app offline should have taken minutes.
by lopis
5/4/2026 at 11:26:53 AM
People react differently to feedback without necessarily bad intentions. Not everyone is ready to instantly admit mistakes. Empathy goes a long way.by 47282847
5/4/2026 at 10:23:52 AM
A malicious actor would be happy to be publicly labeled inexperienced/naive.by f3408fh
5/4/2026 at 10:48:04 AM
That reasoning holds but it is not based on any of the facts at hand. There's a reason why any community worth being apart of has a tendency to assume good faith. People make mistakes. I respect Don Ho's response and I don't see how the pitchfork brigade is bringing anything valuable to the situation.by doginasuit
5/4/2026 at 11:04:54 AM
People are pissed because instead of taking the feedback, apologizing and acting immediately, he wrote comment after comment giving excuses. What he did is literally illegal, and ignorance or good intentions is not a solid excuse.by lopis
5/4/2026 at 10:54:55 AM
If you’d actually installed it and realized afterward that you’d been misled, whether by someone who doesn’t understand trademarks or someone acting in bad faith, you’d probably feel differently. Leaving a comment on HN in that situation is a pretty reasonable reaction.by f3408fh
5/4/2026 at 11:59:24 AM
The inverse Hanlon's razor cuts much better than the original one these days:Never attribute to stupidity (incompetence|naivety) that which is adequately explained by malice.
by wartywhoa23
5/4/2026 at 12:19:34 PM
You don't need an inverse Hanlon's razor, that's the natural response and a recipe for a social dumpster fire.by doginasuit
5/4/2026 at 11:52:53 AM
This. A billion times this. The community should be shouting from the rooftops that there is an intruder in the neighborhood.Maybe there's no malice intended and this is just a colossal pile of honest mistakes. Maybe this author is as clueless as he appears. Maybe, but until he appears at the United Nations and doxes himself before embarking on a world wide apology tour, nobody in their right mind should install that binary. I wouldn't even run the build script in a sandbox.
by i_think_so
5/4/2026 at 10:44:05 AM
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 itAlso, his medium avatar looks awfully generated.
by pndy
5/4/2026 at 11:01:54 AM
It reads to me like English isn't his first language. Either way the complexities of open source licensing are something a lot of people don't understand.by RobotToaster
5/4/2026 at 11:55:14 AM
Does he remind you of anyone?by i_think_so
5/4/2026 at 11:13:41 AM
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.
by freehorse
5/4/2026 at 11:54:32 AM
Product manager in software for 10 years. I cannot believe the inexperienced defense.by whateverboat
5/4/2026 at 11:15:37 AM
> 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
by efilife
5/4/2026 at 10:26:11 AM
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.
by LeCompteSftware
5/4/2026 at 11:17:48 AM
I'm spamming this everywhere - taken from his blog:> 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.
Also' he's not young. Check his github avatar
by efilife
5/4/2026 at 11:24:30 AM
It sounds like BS. Guy’s done it all if you believe his resume.by f3408fh
5/4/2026 at 10:33:30 AM
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.
by doginasuit
5/4/2026 at 10:40:06 AM
It sounds brazen and incredibly entitled. The LLM response seems fitting for a vibe coded project with a vibe brain author.by Semaphor
5/4/2026 at 10:28:38 AM
AI means never having to ask permission. Or forgiveness, it seems.by pjc50
5/4/2026 at 11:35:00 AM
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.
by 2ndorderthought
5/4/2026 at 12:09:08 PM
Asking? Inessential!by wartywhoa23
5/4/2026 at 10:30:41 AM
> 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.
by bartread
5/4/2026 at 11:08:44 AM
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.by RobotToaster
5/4/2026 at 11:59:30 AM
I think the reasonable response would be to take the website down and make the repo private while they change the name.by NicuCalcea
5/4/2026 at 11:30:54 AM
Yeah it's pretty clear that he's well-intentioned. There are plenty of ports of open source projects literally named "port of <trademarked name>" and generally the original authors don't mind. what even is the point of open source if you can't do that?If I fork a repo on GitHub and the name of the project is trademarked, have I committed trademark violation?
In this case he just went a little too far by cloning the whole website. Even then tbh I still take his side because it's in the spirit of the Wild West Internet culture to have done something like this.
by roncesvalles
5/4/2026 at 10:19:05 AM
"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?!?!"
by LeCompteSftware
5/4/2026 at 10:37:28 AM
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.
by ssl-3
5/4/2026 at 10:54:37 AM
We have found the limits of agentic engineering. Changing a logo on a website apparently takes weeks.by ares623
5/4/2026 at 10:41:04 AM
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.by as1mov
5/4/2026 at 11:10:06 AM
This comment really put it into perspective to me. I wouldn't have phrased it better myselfby efilife
5/4/2026 at 11:07:09 AM
Oh what the hell. This is the vibe coder mentality. Grift, as far as it goesby efilife