Another sad day for Open Source

#opensource #github

Package Control (tool to handle extensions on Sublime Text) authors are against open source and they steal others projects.

Material Theme, my popular theme for many editors (milions of downloads and 11k ⭐️ on Github), and the most popular theme for Sublime Text, has been deprecated back in 2016. Some days ago we decided to drop the repository since we got 0 contributions and becase it was really old and including dangerous code and dependencies.

Today we found Sublime Text authors just stole the WHOLE repository publishing the theme again, under their name, by replacing ANY reference of original authors with their names.

We opened a pull-request to restore the original theme made by us with all the credits. Let's see if they accept it, or they want to keep the stolen repository.

Remember, the original Material themes live here. Other projects are just stolen and unsupported copies.

Today I'll quit with open source. If you love open source like i did, consider different text editors (there are many now, also free) of at least consider using a different theme.

If you want to help and build a new Material Theme for Sublime Text, contact us on Twitter.

Top comments (2)

Gil Fewster • Dec 12 '22

You released your theme with an MIT license which explicitly grants permission to any other developer or company to use, modify, package, and distribute it however they wish.

This text is directly copied from the license file in your source code repository:


Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

You can’t accuse others of stealing your code when you release it with such a permissive license.

I’m addition, based on the comments under your PR to sublime text, it appears they were simply trying to prevent your deletion of the project from creating problems for ST users who had previously installed the theme.

You may be unhappy with what they did, but everything they have done is permitted by the license you released your code under. It is inaccurate and unfair to accuse them of theft.