> 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.

He seems to have enough experience to know how trademarks work

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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

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.

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.

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.

We have found the limits of agentic engineering. Changing a logo on a website apparently takes weeks.

Smells like AI slop past its expiration date, to be honest.

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.

It sounds brazen and incredibly entitled. The LLM response seems fitting for a vibe coded project with a vibe brain author.

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.

Smart. Good on you for noticing it wasn’t the real website.

Me neither. So far all I see is a puny "[Updated]" title on the article with no apology or indication of what was updated.

The National Enquirer publishing rumors and gossip?! I'll never read them again!

A website that's specialized into running unconfirmed rumors for clicks, shocking!

So, it's a French trademark. Not a lawyer, but from what I remember trademarks need to be registered in every region you want to enforce them in separately.

If the author of "Notepad++ for Mac" doesn't happen to be French as well, is there anything (legally) preventing them from using this trademark?

> "Objective-Notepad" was right there.

It still is. There's only a handful of hits on Google for that, too.

You should do it. I'd do it if I had a Mac and used Notepad++ ;-)