YHK - yet another hacker news clone

There is no official XScreenSaver GitHub repository

38 points st_goliath 2 hours ago 17 comments

altairprime 1 hour ago | parent

The only thing missing is to mark it as Archived so that all of the GitHub features are turned off.

cookiengineer 1 hour ago | parent

Instead of providing a mirrored repository, they decided to intentionally not fixing the correctly identified problem while simultaneously still living 30 years in the past.

Setting up a git mirror that auto syncs takes less than 2mins of effort. And way less time than writing up this README that's just there to lecture people. If it's about disagreement with github, there's also better alternatives.

You can still setup the mirror and be done with it, and put the original repo links at the top in the README.

messe 1 hour ago | parent

> Maybe someone should fork xscreensaver as xscreensaver-ng as a community project?

Feel free.

pil0u 1 hour ago | parent

It's obvious that the author wants to make a statement, and has their own reason to not expose their work on GitHub. Setting up a mirror would probably contradict these reasons.

amiga386 24 minutes ago | parent

> It's obvious that the author wants to make a statement

Microsoft destroyed his company via illegal means.

Microsoft own GitHub.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars

st_goliath 1 hour ago | parent

The upstream has no public repository, neither on GitHub nor anywhere else.

JWZ might not even use git in the first place, the source might be in a local SVN repo, or just a series of tarballs and patches, assuming it is version controlled at all.

antiloper 1 hour ago | parent

> they decided to intentionally not fixing the correctly identified problem

Which problem?

cxr 1 hour ago | parent

> You can still setup the mirror and be done with it, and put the original repo links at the top in the README

There is no original repo to link to. That's why the README says that there isn't one.

> Setting up a git mirror that auto syncs takes less than 2mins

Prove it.

mykhamill 1 hour ago | parent

Right now, I would love to live 30 years in the past.

sick_of_slop 47 minutes ago | parent

Or they could not. It’s their project they can do what they want you are not entitled to their labour.

bcvvvy 12 minutes ago | parent

Using a public source code hosting product is a choice.

Also centralising everything in one place is a seriously bad idea.

createful 1 hour ago | parent

So what's the point of making a GitHub if you're not going to publish source code? Is this an inside joke?

nevon 1 hour ago | parent

To prevent impersonation and having people download potential malware from repositories posing as the official xscreensaver distribution channel.

amiga386 46 minutes ago | parent

Jeff Merkey is the person claiming the "xscreensaver" organisation on GitHub, despite it not being, and never has been, his project.

He has promised to drop that and move the repo to /hisname/xscreensaver, but only if JWZ flatters his ego first. Sounds like he knows he's squatting on someone else's good name, but thinks he's so clever and well versed in trademark law that he'd be deliberately antagonistic all the way to the end of a huge legal bill. Just to force him to do the right thing.

He knows what the right thing is and could do it at any time, but just look at his priors and tell me he'll do that:

https://www.dmlp.org/threats/merkey-v-does

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitra...

rwmj 5 minutes ago | parent

I know that name ... https://lwn.net/Articles/140157/

bcvvvy 43 minutes ago | parent

GitHub is not authoritative and never should be considered as authoritative. Anyone can publish your stuff on there as your name.

It’s a huge problem. Glad to see he’s at least put a placeholder on there.

ytxm 2 minutes ago | parent

Opening with the word "I" and continuing in that manner is the real reason there's no official xscreensaver repository