I inadvertently used someone else's trademark, once. They weren't really doing a good job of managing it, so it didn't show up in any of my searches (which did not include the USPTO, which didn't have a decent Web presence, back then).
They contacted me, after it had been up (a Website), and said I needed to stop using it immediately.
They were right. I was wrong. It came down in an hour, and I set up a new site, using a different name, in a day or so.
I offered to give them the domain name. They didn't want it, but that was fine. I stopped using (and paying for) it immediately.
> Every day that website remains active, you are in further violation of the law. I cannot authorize a "week or two" of continued trademark infringement.
> Please take down the domain immediately so you can focus on your rebranding efforts without legal interference. If the site is not removed, I will have no choice but to escalate the takedown request.
I think there's a significant chance this fake Notepad++ for Mac is/becomes a vector for malware.
The author is impossibly naive. The best interpretation is they are easy dupes for a supply-chain attack.
Hopefully the word gets around that no one should install this (whether or not the author of the fake version eventually finishes "evolving the branding" of the port).
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.
A charitable interpretation is that the author is very young, by my estimate of how they write and their confusion of how accountability works it’s probably a middle-schooled kid first dipping their toes into software.
The way they’re acting is par for how a lot of adults view the world. Disregarding intellectual property rights is some people’s entire personality on the internet. Piracy and ignoring IP law have been glorified for years as being an anti-corporate rebellion, but the anti-corporate message has been lost by many who believe that IP rights and trademark shouldn’t exist at all. Even when the targets are anything but corporate.
> it’s probably a middle-schooled kid first dipping their toes into software.
They've got a fake LinkedIn profile (that's 9 years old) if that's the case showing professional experience, and are using someone else's image on it and their GitHub profile and personal site.
In case anyone else was confused. The author of this fork replied to some trademark discussion with a “fuck trademarks” response. He edited/deleted it but you can still see it in some of the quoted replies.
The only place I see that is from a user "LiEnby" not "aletik", and none of aletik's existing messages are edited. All replies I see with the message are also to LiEnby. I don't agree with aletik's slow response in any way, but I don't think your claim is correct either. Do you have anything to prove that this was said by aletik?
When I first read about the MacOS port from HN, I also assumed it was blessed by Don Ho. I was fooled by the new website. Now that I know it was not coordinated, it looks weird (even creepy/uncanny valley'ish) in hindsight, especially using all the same icons and branding, and including Don Ho on the author page.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s probably a few thousand users. When I switched to mac, I looked for notepad++ and settled on BBEdit (which is awesome and funny I forgot about it all these years).
"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)
There's the rub, I miss. Notepad++ is thoroughly a Windows app. Linux and Mac natives have no appetite for one of the most thoroughly Windows-ass Windows app around. Switchers, sure. But take me as an example. I've been on a Mac since 2007. At this point I'm a native. I'm not even aware of what Notepad++ really does.
Well, I am a "switcher" since 20 years, so rather OS agnostic. I regulaty switch between linux and windows (and chromeos) and sometimes mac and ideally I want all my apps to work the same, no matter the OS.
Sublime I like, but is proprietary (and there was something else). VScode is too heavy, kate as well. (But maybe with kate I just need to modify the key bindings so they match what I am used to, I only recently tried it out)
Basically, I want code folding(with option to collapse all the tree), macrorecording, search (replace) in files, but with all the goodies notepadd++ provides, where I can easily set the folder to search, what filepatterns to exclude etc.
Interesting. I'd have thought that Linux users would go traditional (vi vs. Emacs) or for something heavier (vscode), or quick and easy for when you just need $EDITOR (nano).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
As stated multiple times in the linked discussion: the licensing of the open source code is not the issue. It's the use of the trademark, and making their fork look like an officially endorsed one.
And the fork author was given a oppertunity to remediate without further drama. Instead, the fork author doubled down, where the possible reasons for that behavior are hard to interpret in good faith.
His linkedin (on which he posted about notepad++) is pretty light publicly but it does have a post about him speaking at a conference in NY on product management and people actually commenting that they saw his talk. That was a year ago, so definitely possible that there's some "setup an account to look real" BS going on but at first glance my take is that he's a real person.
The people on HN might be surprised by how little the average naive software-adjacent person knows about intellectual property law. I've been following it since I was 12, but most people barely know what a trademark is let alone what enforcement looks like.
Here's my guess: Eastern European origin, currently working and likely living in NY, PM gets ahold of Claude and decides to vibe code himself a port of Notepad++. Maybe he really has good intentions, maybe he is looking to make donation money, maybe a bit of both, whatever. Probably looking for donation money. Regardless, he thinks "Oh people fork/port open source projects all the time, I'll just do that" and has no conception whatsoever that he is going to piss people off OR that he's violating the law. English is not his first language either I'd bet, and he's using Claude to write a lot of / all of his comments. Acts frankly ignorant and confused and dumb in response, doesn't know what to do, etc. AI can't help him because he's not even givin the AI context well. A shitstorm ensues.
FWIW, I did a quick/not that advanced static analysis of the code compared to the published binaries and couldn't find anything malicious. I'd leave that to the experts though for any real opinion.
TLDR;; My guess: Dumb PM gone mad with power and looking for a donation-based cash grab, possibly with the good intention of keeping the project going long term, does not know the first thing about IP and does not speak english as his first language. But an actual dude.
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.
What LLMs have brought to our industry is exposure of how many people in it are total pieces of shit. You have the hucksters who are out there trying to get you to invest in their LLM startup and they constantly use language that is functionally lying about what their product is by likening what it does to actual functioning human brains and personalities. You have the fantasists who see a grammatically correct sentence as proof of omnipotence and then run around telling everyone how AI has totally changed everything. You have the posers who use LLMs to cut-n-paste code from other's repos, directly and indirectly, and then claim they wrote it and pretend to have skills and abilities they don't have. Then you have the ignoramuses in media and such who know nothing, they hear all the hucksters and fantasists jibber-jabbing and proceed to flood the world with untrue stories about AI and it's affects on society.
> 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.
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'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.
You know, what's frustrating is that when I first contemptuously dismissed "Notepad++ for MacOS" as a trademark violation I did skim that stuff and accordingly just sort of assumed the port was technically legitimate, but disrespectful of copyright. But of course it was vibe-coded, and apparently chock full of stupid bugs that would have been caught with adequate manual testing. Why wouldn't I assume otherwise?
This from his website is pretty funny:
These days I'm deep in multi-agent AI and honestly it's changed everything. I build with both hands, one on the code, one on the vision. I can finally bring to life ideas I've been carrying around for years that always needed too many people and too many quarters.
The first well-known software he vibe-coded is a buggy port of something a talented human spent many decades hand-crafting. The slop project is completely devoid of creativity or imagination, and it's going down in public flames because he was stupid about copyright. Kind of cartoonish, actually.
The sad thing is that I expect this to rise as time passes. Most vibe-coders, from what I've seen, are exactly like this guy: they have no idea of trademark or copyright law and think that they can just... Do things like this without consequences. They will self-justify until they're blue in the face and not learn anything from it. There are, of course, exceptions to this generalization, but I don't know how significant said exceptions really are going to be to this.
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.
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.
I am on the fence about using an LLM to respond to situations like this, particularly if it is a screenshot and it is obvious what they are doing.
It is snarky and cringe, but also goes to show how poorly the decision making is by the author that even an LLM is pointing out how badly you are handling this.
Especially when this is clearly a vibe coded project.
What's amazing to me is how I was downvoted into oblivion on a few different subreddits and forums for expressing concern about the vibe-coded nature of the project and that the author of the Mac port appeared to be using the Notepad++ name/branding without any official blessing from the project.
> 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.
Indeed, and in general. Popular, well supported open source project around for decades not available in POSIX, somehow?
In Linux, the only things I don't have with Wine are whatever the other clipboard is that highlighting text gets filled with and access to network shares. Such nothingburgers that I've never spent real time to figure out if there's a solution.
I've never managed to get MS Office running successfully on Wine, at least not any recent version of it anyway. That might work fine on Linux but it doesn't get past the first handful of pages of the installer on macOS.
It's not the end of the world, but the Windows version of Excel is streets ahead of the macOS version, which is why I was keen to make it work.
Otherwise, everything I really care about from Windows - the odd utility, along with retro computing emulators - seems to run fine on Wine. I haven't got into more modern games so can't speak to how well they tend to run.
When someone has an issue getting something like Notepad++ running with Wine, they have the option to inform the Notepad++ project or if they possess the skills, submit a change so that Notepad++ will run smoothly on Wine. Or, inform Wine and they may figure out how to fix the issue within Wine.
I haven't bothered getting Office running on Linux in a very long time. The only thing I miss is a convenient way to print envelopes, as LibreOffice is incapable of doing this. However, I mail far less than I used to so I just hand write the addresses.
I think the only real way to run Office is on Windows in VirtualBox, which I still haven't had any need to bother with.
> I think the only real way to run Office is on Windows in VirtualBox
I think you’re right, but I just don’t want to run full Windows because it’s such a resource hog. It’s always chewing CPU for some background task or other, and so it drains the battery noticeably quicker.
I have the Mac version of Office, which is fine for most things, and LibreOffice fills the gap for a small handful of non-Excel tasks, but I do love Windows Excel for more complex spreadsheet tasks.
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.
To be clear in the GitHub thread Don Ho repeatedly encouraged him to do this, and said it was cool that he was trying to bring Notepad++ to Mac! Just don't make it look like Don Ho and the rest of the team is responsible for any quality issues. Don't use the logo!
I wish people wouldn't abuse the author of that project over this. Giving them the benefit of the doubt in that this was a mistake and not intentionally malicious, it feels really bad for hundreds if not thousands of people to send hate, insults, abuse to a single individual. Shame on the people who are doing that.
Trademark is the one form of IP I genuinely appreciate (minus anything involving the International Olympic Committee). If I buy something labeled as a Coke, I want some strong assurances that it was made by the Coca-Cola company, not a fan who wanted to bring Coke to new venues. If I were to buy a Dell laptop, first, shoot me because I’ve lost my mind. But if I did, then I want to know it’s made by Dell Corp and not someone collecting parts off Alibaba. Trademarks benefit their owners, but they also benefit the customers.
Which is all to say this story is wild. Sorry, author, this is not Notepad++, and saying otherwise is lying to the end users. Don Ho has a reputation to protect as the real author. This fork has nothing to protect; it could embed a code exporter to shop all your stuff to North Korea without costing its author any rep, because they weren’t starting with any to begin with. I don’t know Ho, I don’t use Windows, and I’ve never used Notepad++, but this lie is dangerous to Ho, and the people using his stuff because they trust his name.
It’s rare you see an IP argument where one side is clearly legally and ethically correct. This is our one for the year, I suspect.
it's nothing new. young people are ambitious and internet has been "claimed" by "last gen".
I have a project with only ~600 stars. someone approached me want to contribute an adjacent project to be part of "official suite" and do rev share on my donation, and she already purchased a domain with a different TLD.
Fortunately, she agreed with my recommendation of using her brand and maintain her own donation jar, she still owns that domain but not using it so far.
In coordination with Don Ho, the creator of the original Notepad++, I'll be evolving the branding of the macOS version so it stands on its own while respecting its lineage. These updates, such as a new logo, a refined name, and likely a new domain will ship with version 1.0.6 in the coming days. Continuity for existing users is a priority, and I'll make the transition as seamless as I can. Thank you for your patience.
Did Don Ho really coordinated with this author?! If no then why he lies and he knows he is lying? Where this path leads to?! Really weird times to be alive!!
FFS. I installed it after seeing it here on HN and on MacRumors. Terrible failure on my part but MacRumors should offer an apology for endorsing this fake release.
You can’t take MacRumors seriously in that sense in general, they often distort their sources and barely do any journalistic due diligence. They are serviceable as a news feed for the sources they link to, and for the rumored-upcoming-features summary listicles.
Plenty of very thoughtful comments so far about copyright, community, developers who might not speak English as a first language, .... Very few people mentioning the obvious:
MALICIOUS BINARY!
Did we learn nothing from the xz malware fiasco? One update quietly pushed out at night while nobody's paying attention and boom.
I would not trust this "Notepad++ for Mac" at all. The author of the "port", aka Vibe Coded slop, Andrey Letov has absolutely zero commits anywhere before he suddenly vibes up this mac release. He brands it as an official Notepad++ version, is slimy in the way he interacts with the Notepad++ team etc. I would not be surprised if theres some sort of back door or malware attack vector embedded in this software. Stay away! Remember the XZ Utils backdoor!
There are a lot of NPP users out there, and probably the most important thing, given that they use it to edit all their files, is that they can trust the software. Some rando out of nowhere saying they've written "NPP for Mac" is red flag central.
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?
"Enforce" yes but the point is that this fork clearly violates broader principles and conventions around respecting clearly active trademarks. Nobody is demanding a lawsuit in French court or any particular legal consequences. But it is totally valid and reasonable for an international company like Cloudflare to crack down on hosting his website: they have French customers.
Also it's really not a finder's-keeper's thing with trademarks and international borders. If someone trademarked Notepad++ in the US and released some janky port with the Notepad++ name, Don Ho could likely still win in US court. Most reasonably knowledgeable US consumers who are plausibly in the market for a Windows text editor are at least superficially familiar with "Notepad++" as the name of a well-regarded software product. I know we travel in certain circles, but there is a reason this guy wants to use "Notepad++" and not "MacnotePlus - A fork of Notepad++ for MacOS." It's a famous name.
That's not correct. You don't have to register a trademark in order for it to be protected, it's just recommended because if you do register it you don't have to separately prove that you have built up brand reputation. That should be pretty easy for a project as old and well-known as this though.
In very, very broad US-centric* strokes: Using a mark in trade is enough to establish a defensible trademark.
Registering a trademark can be useful, but it is also optional. At very least, registration helps make the ownership of the mark easier to discover and this can help everyone start on the right foot.
(* I'm not familiar at all with the laws of France, but that's fine: The alleged violation happened in New York.)
> In very, very broad US-centric* strokes: Using a mark in trade is enough to establish a defensible trademark.
Isn't that only if it's something that would actually qualify for a trademark?
For example, "Car Shop" or probably even "Hamburgers USA" would not qualify for a trademark due to being overly generic/descriptive (in many jurisdictions).
Now in Notepad++'s case the inclusion of the ++ obviously means it would indeed qualify.
Just asking as I'm sure there's people around here with personal experience around the topic, though again it can differ quite a bit by country.
Lots of very plain-looking things work as trademarks. Some obvious examples: AAA, BBB, Target, Just Do It.
There's a lot of nuance in trademarks, including geographical nuance. It's possible for someone to open a small bakery in Boise, Idaho named Bread Stuff and not conflict at all with an existing local bakery named Bread Stuff that operates in Fresno, California.
Having different uses can count, too. Moe's Barber Shop can be a defensible trademark, but that doesn't necessarily conflict at all with Moe's Car Parts across town.
Except: There's also a concept of well-known trademarks, which supercede some of these things. There's a place called Gold and Silver Pawn Shop, in Vegas. There was a time person could build a pawn shop in Somewhere Else Entirely with that same name, and that'd be fine. But now that the Pawn Stars TV series has made the place very famous, it's something that would almost certainly be shown to be a well-known mark if someone were naive enough to try to use that name for their own new pawn shop, today. The Vegas shop would almost certainly win that court battle.
I'd like to think that notepad++ is also a well-known mark by this point.
---
Anyway my intent earlier was just to help promote the concept of registration being optional-but-useful, not to write a book about trademarks. :)
And IANAL. I just got wrapped up in a trademark issue myself nearly 20 years ago, wherein I had been doing nothing wrong by using a name that another small company had been already been using in a very different market segment. Our uses were for very different things.
They subsequently got much bigger and arguably came to be well-known, and they wanted me to stop using that name. I had a valid case: I wasn't infringing when I started.
But I no money and no lawyers, while they had enough money and lawyers that there was no way I'd survive in court.
Hell, there was no way I'd even be able to afford to appear in court; I'd have lost by default and probably been required to pay for the whole mess. I was broke as fuck back then (I still am, but I was then, too).
But what I did have was some time, so I used that time to stuff my brain full of information about how trademarks work -- to prove to myself whether I had a leg to stand on as much as anything else.
I should have just given up. A sane person would have just washed their hands of it all and moved on. But I really liked the name I was using, and I am not always very sane.
It worked out OK, I guess: At the end of that very stressful time, I wound up giving them exactly what they wanted, and they ended up giving me some money in exchange. No courtroom was involved.
And now we're square. (And to be clear: I don't blame them at all for any of this. They're a good company. But even good companies are required to actively defend their trademark. Trademarks are not like patents: You need to use it, and actively defend it, or it is lost.)
(posting my comment from the other thread) Hilarious. How long does it take to vibecode the requests to change the logo and name. Vibecoding a port from scratch is super fast as long as you don't need permission huh. Then when the adults ask you to not infringe on copyright, it's all "please be patient guys. I am boy. Give me one week pls."
Anyone from Moody's, BNY, AxiomSL, Amex. Who knew "Andrey Letov" and can contact him on his personal email/phone to verify?
Author of Mac notepad github repo claims he worked there, https://aletik.me/ (1 month old personal website), he also has new Github and new Linkedin.
https://github.com/aletik
If someone has reverse image search platform, use his github profile picture. There is another Linkedin profile, with same guy, but slightly different picture.
You don’t adopt an unofficial fork just because it exists. Showing up with a clone isn’t the same as meeting the standards required to be part of the original project
That might have been a possibility if brought forward in an open and reasonable way, a bit harder to trust someone once they just vibe adopted the project someone was working on for decades and didn't seen an issue with that. Also "just" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
The "author" couldn't tell you the why behind any of the original design decisions. It's vibecoded, they never had to know. They would be a terrible teammate with no actual understanding of the project.
Maybe there are trust issues now?
I certainly would refuse to work with someone who comes and steals my brand, pretends I am on board with this and refuses to comply even after being called out.
Nobody else has pointed this out, but a MacOS port of Notepad++ actually goes against some of the branding. Notepad++ very much markets itself as a lightweight and speedy thing that uses the low-level Win32 API directly. It is not just a native application, it is a Windows-native application. Porting it to macOS requires a level of care and expertise which is tantamount to changing the entire organization.
I am sure the Notepad++ team is perfectly fine focusing on Windows expertise and has no interest in bringing in the overhead of another OS. If a serious macOS expert wants to do that, they can fork the project with a different name.
BTW look at the GitHub issues. This is a lazy developer creating a slop project. It would be stupid to bring this incompetent and dishonest person on board.
He probably didn't know it was trademarked, and probably didn't think people would get upset, and he's now trying to make it right. Why assume malice on this guy?
The fact it's trademarked provides the original project more legal protections, but regardless of whether or not a trademark is registered it's clearly unethical to use another project's name without prior permission. If it weren't a trademark violation, it'd still be wrong, so the knowledge of whether or not it was registered as a trademark is basically irrelevant.
> 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 see a Russian name, I assume very cavalier approach to copyright and trademark laws, especially if it is about someone else's copyright or trademark. This heuristic has had enough nines for me to qualify as 100% accurate.
Source: having been in ex-USSR through all of 1990s and 2000s.
Trademark laws? Copyright? Private property? Comrade, you must have hit your head hard, now quick, get the shovel, we need to load the coal in another truck for the glory of the Soviet Union!
Notepad++ is GPL, and this fork has followed the rules of that license.
Other GPL projects have unofficial forks that didn't change the name or logo for the software in the process, and it mostly seems fine. FreeBSD ports are probably a good example of these in the wild.
Listing the original author as an author of the port is a requirement of the GPL, and the language used on this website makes it clear that Dan is the original author of the Windows release, and not the developer of the Mac release.
The only thing I see as an issue here is how the author of the port, Andrey, has failed to directly indicate that this is an unofficial port anywhere on the website, and is promoting this as if it were official. He does seem to be some engaging in some shameless self-promotion, and I understand how the open source community would not appreciate someone vibe-porting a popular GPL tool, and then acting like they own part of the official project now.
> FreeBSD ports are probably a good example of these in the wild.
FreeBSD ports are nearly always tiny patches on a project together it to compile on that OS, and look for its config in /usr/local/etc instead of /etc. It is the original software plus minimal tweaks. Linux distros do the exact same thing. When you install a Debian package, you’re getting Debian’s patched version. Same for RedHat, Homebrew, and nearly every other package manager.
The fork we’re discussing here is a rewrite of the original in a different language while still calling it the original name.
Ironically, like "notepad". I always find it odd how infringers feel ownership and get defensive about their infringement. Like release groups getting pissy about people reposting/renaming their releases.
Windows Notepad isn't a standalone product, but a Windows feature that has its title localized into every language as part of Windows, none of which are registered as a trademark.
And should it be considered a commercial product, Notepad alone is too generic so the trademark would probably be Windows/Microsoft Notepad, just like products named Something-Office both predate and followed Microsoft Office.
This is the same kind of situation as if Linus Torvalds accused Arch Linux in Linux trademark violation.
Otherwise, it looks a dishonest game: Notepad++ author gladly receives contributions from community, but he is not ok when the focus is shifted away from his persona, his project, and most importantly, his website.
At the end, it boils down to money: there are tons of ads on Notepad++ website, so having a competitive offering like "Notepad++ for Mac" threatens that business strategy.
So, while Notepad++ is GPL 2.0 de jure, de facto it's something else and has strings attached.
I wasn’t even aware a native port was available for Mac. I tried it with Wine and it was awful. These days my colleagues and I are using Zed as the de facto high-performance text editor.
I inadvertently used someone else's trademark, once. They weren't really doing a good job of managing it, so it didn't show up in any of my searches (which did not include the USPTO, which didn't have a decent Web presence, back then).
They contacted me, after it had been up (a Website), and said I needed to stop using it immediately.
They were right. I was wrong. It came down in an hour, and I set up a new site, using a different name, in a day or so.
I offered to give them the domain name. They didn't want it, but that was fine. I stopped using (and paying for) it immediately.
The latest issue comment from Don Ho is lookin' fiery! I love me some open source drama...
https://github.com/notepad-plus-plus/notepad-plus-plus/issue...
I think there's a significant chance this fake Notepad++ for Mac is/becomes a vector for malware.
The author is impossibly naive. The best interpretation is they are easy dupes for a supply-chain attack.
Hopefully the word gets around that no one should install this (whether or not the author of the fake version eventually finishes "evolving the branding" of the port).
Too bad MacRumors didn't bother doing more than adding a note to where they recommended this fake copy: https://www.macrumors.com/2026/04/29/notepad-plus-plus-edito...
They didn't even bother removing the links!
Using the trademark is one thing. The authors brazen reaction another: https://github.com/notepad-plus-plus/notepad-plus-plus/issue...
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.
> Tech bloggers should know better than to promote this without checking.
Agreed, and it also seems unlikely this will be their takeaway. They now get to report on the drama which will probably get more clicks.
"The author" in above comment refers to the author of the port. So, yes, thats what they meant.
The disclaimer he put up on the website is comical. "In coordination with [original author], I will be _evolving the brand_ to …"
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?
A charitable interpretation is that the author is very young, by my estimate of how they write and their confusion of how accountability works it’s probably a middle-schooled kid first dipping their toes into software.
The way they’re acting is par for how a lot of adults view the world. Disregarding intellectual property rights is some people’s entire personality on the internet. Piracy and ignoring IP law have been glorified for years as being an anti-corporate rebellion, but the anti-corporate message has been lost by many who believe that IP rights and trademark shouldn’t exist at all. Even when the targets are anything but corporate.
> it’s probably a middle-schooled kid first dipping their toes into software.
They've got a fake LinkedIn profile (that's 9 years old) if that's the case showing professional experience, and are using someone else's image on it and their GitHub profile and personal site.
https://aletik.me/
More likely, the guy is just a clown.
Smells like AI slop past its expiration date, to be honest.
Maybe this is some weird attempt to see if malicious takeover with bots is possible
In case anyone else was confused. The author of this fork replied to some trademark discussion with a “fuck trademarks” response. He edited/deleted it but you can still see it in some of the quoted replies.
Fork author is either a young kid or clueless.
The only place I see that is from a user "LiEnby" not "aletik", and none of aletik's existing messages are edited. All replies I see with the message are also to LiEnby. I don't agree with aletik's slow response in any way, but I don't think your claim is correct either. Do you have anything to prove that this was said by aletik?
Or a tech founder (gestures at Ubercab)
When I first read about the MacOS port from HN, I also assumed it was blessed by Don Ho. I was fooled by the new website. Now that I know it was not coordinated, it looks weird (even creepy/uncanny valley'ish) in hindsight, especially using all the same icons and branding, and including Don Ho on the author page.
The brazen part is Andrey Letov pretending to not understand.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Judging by the fork author's name, should've asked them in russian :-/
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.
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.
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.
> capture the notepad++ macos market
Is 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.
It’s probably a few thousand users. When I switched to mac, I looked for notepad++ and settled on BBEdit (which is awesome and funny I forgot about it all these years).
This doesn’t seem like for money, but for esteem.
"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)
> I miss
There's the rub, I miss. Notepad++ is thoroughly a Windows app. Linux and Mac natives have no appetite for one of the most thoroughly Windows-ass Windows app around. Switchers, sure. But take me as an example. I've been on a Mac since 2007. At this point I'm a native. I'm not even aware of what Notepad++ really does.
Well, I am a "switcher" since 20 years, so rather OS agnostic. I regulaty switch between linux and windows (and chromeos) and sometimes mac and ideally I want all my apps to work the same, no matter the OS.
Any pointers on what exactly you miss compared to Linux alternatives like Kate, Sublime, VSCode, etc? (Assuming you already tried them)
Sublime I like, but is proprietary (and there was something else). VScode is too heavy, kate as well. (But maybe with kate I just need to modify the key bindings so they match what I am used to, I only recently tried it out)
Basically, I want code folding(with option to collapse all the tree), macrorecording, search (replace) in files, but with all the goodies notepadd++ provides, where I can easily set the folder to search, what filepatterns to exclude etc.
Interesting. I'd have thought that Linux users would go traditional (vi vs. Emacs) or for something heavier (vscode), or quick and easy for when you just need $EDITOR (nano).
For some reasons I never liked vi nor emacs, vscode is indeed too heavy and nano too awkward. I use mostly xed, but it lacks compared to notepad++
Notepadqq is a decent crack at a Notepad++ clone for Linux, but it is no longer actively maintained.
Thanks, I did not try out that one, though it being abandoned is of course not great.
A malicious actor would be happy to be publicly labeled inexperienced/naive.
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.
You don't need an inverse Hanlon's razor, that's the natural response and a recipe for a social dumpster fire.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Naive my ass.
From the fork's authors page
> Andrey Letov is a New York product leader and software engineer.
And then a long list of professional achievements follows.
He knows exactly what he's doing
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.
> Also, his medium avatar looks awfully generated.
What do you mean by this? Aren’t most avatar images generated three days?
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.
As stated multiple times in the linked discussion: the licensing of the open source code is not the issue. It's the use of the trademark, and making their fork look like an officially endorsed one.
And the fork author was given a oppertunity to remediate without further drama. Instead, the fork author doubled down, where the possible reasons for that behavior are hard to interpret in good faith.
Ironic this comment reads like you didn’t even grok the basics of the issue if you think open source licensing is the source of confusion.
Does he remind you of anyone?
https://www.wired.com/story/jia-tan-xz-backdoor/
His linkedin (on which he posted about notepad++) is pretty light publicly but it does have a post about him speaking at a conference in NY on product management and people actually commenting that they saw his talk. That was a year ago, so definitely possible that there's some "setup an account to look real" BS going on but at first glance my take is that he's a real person.
The people on HN might be surprised by how little the average naive software-adjacent person knows about intellectual property law. I've been following it since I was 12, but most people barely know what a trademark is let alone what enforcement looks like.
Here's my guess: Eastern European origin, currently working and likely living in NY, PM gets ahold of Claude and decides to vibe code himself a port of Notepad++. Maybe he really has good intentions, maybe he is looking to make donation money, maybe a bit of both, whatever. Probably looking for donation money. Regardless, he thinks "Oh people fork/port open source projects all the time, I'll just do that" and has no conception whatsoever that he is going to piss people off OR that he's violating the law. English is not his first language either I'd bet, and he's using Claude to write a lot of / all of his comments. Acts frankly ignorant and confused and dumb in response, doesn't know what to do, etc. AI can't help him because he's not even givin the AI context well. A shitstorm ensues.
FWIW, I did a quick/not that advanced static analysis of the code compared to the published binaries and couldn't find anything malicious. I'd leave that to the experts though for any real opinion.
TLDR;; My guess: Dumb PM gone mad with power and looking for a donation-based cash grab, possibly with the good intention of keeping the project going long term, does not know the first thing about IP and does not speak english as his first language. But an actual dude.
We'll see how it shakes out.
Product manager in software for 10 years. I cannot believe the inexperienced defense.
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.
What LLMs have brought to our industry is exposure of how many people in it are total pieces of shit. You have the hucksters who are out there trying to get you to invest in their LLM startup and they constantly use language that is functionally lying about what their product is by likening what it does to actual functioning human brains and personalities. You have the fantasists who see a grammatically correct sentence as proof of omnipotence and then run around telling everyone how AI has totally changed everything. You have the posers who use LLMs to cut-n-paste code from other's repos, directly and indirectly, and then claim they wrote it and pretend to have skills and abilities they don't have. Then you have the ignoramuses in media and such who know nothing, they hear all the hucksters and fantasists jibber-jabbing and proceed to flood the world with untrue stories about AI and it's affects on society.
> 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
thats a lot of companies for a guy so young. Probably gets the boot a bunch.
the road to hell is paved with good intentions
> His response makes me believe …
I’d pay more attention to his behavior.
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'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
You know, what's frustrating is that when I first contemptuously dismissed "Notepad++ for MacOS" as a trademark violation I did skim that stuff and accordingly just sort of assumed the port was technically legitimate, but disrespectful of copyright. But of course it was vibe-coded, and apparently chock full of stupid bugs that would have been caught with adequate manual testing. Why wouldn't I assume otherwise?
This from his website is pretty funny:
The first well-known software he vibe-coded is a buggy port of something a talented human spent many decades hand-crafting. The slop project is completely devoid of creativity or imagination, and it's going down in public flames because he was stupid about copyright. Kind of cartoonish, actually.The sad thing is that I expect this to rise as time passes. Most vibe-coders, from what I've seen, are exactly like this guy: they have no idea of trademark or copyright law and think that they can just... Do things like this without consequences. They will self-justify until they're blue in the face and not learn anything from it. There are, of course, exceptions to this generalization, but I don't know how significant said exceptions really are going to be to this.
It sounds like BS. Guy’s done it all if you believe his resume.
AI means never having to ask permission. Or forgiveness, it seems.
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.
Asking? Inessential!
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.
It sounds brazen and incredibly entitled. The LLM response seems fitting for a vibe coded project with a vibe brain author.
I am on the fence about using an LLM to respond to situations like this, particularly if it is a screenshot and it is obvious what they are doing.
It is snarky and cringe, but also goes to show how poorly the decision making is by the author that even an LLM is pointing out how badly you are handling this.
Especially when this is clearly a vibe coded project.
What's amazing to me is how I was downvoted into oblivion on a few different subreddits and forums for expressing concern about the vibe-coded nature of the project and that the author of the Mac port appeared to be using the Notepad++ name/branding without any official blessing from the project.
> 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.
Indeed, and in general. Popular, well supported open source project around for decades not available in POSIX, somehow?
In Linux, the only things I don't have with Wine are whatever the other clipboard is that highlighting text gets filled with and access to network shares. Such nothingburgers that I've never spent real time to figure out if there's a solution.
I've never managed to get MS Office running successfully on Wine, at least not any recent version of it anyway. That might work fine on Linux but it doesn't get past the first handful of pages of the installer on macOS.
It's not the end of the world, but the Windows version of Excel is streets ahead of the macOS version, which is why I was keen to make it work.
Otherwise, everything I really care about from Windows - the odd utility, along with retro computing emulators - seems to run fine on Wine. I haven't got into more modern games so can't speak to how well they tend to run.
MS Office is not an open source project.
When someone has an issue getting something like Notepad++ running with Wine, they have the option to inform the Notepad++ project or if they possess the skills, submit a change so that Notepad++ will run smoothly on Wine. Or, inform Wine and they may figure out how to fix the issue within Wine.
I haven't bothered getting Office running on Linux in a very long time. The only thing I miss is a convenient way to print envelopes, as LibreOffice is incapable of doing this. However, I mail far less than I used to so I just hand write the addresses.
I think the only real way to run Office is on Windows in VirtualBox, which I still haven't had any need to bother with.
> I think the only real way to run Office is on Windows in VirtualBox
I think you’re right, but I just don’t want to run full Windows because it’s such a resource hog. It’s always chewing CPU for some background task or other, and so it drains the battery noticeably quicker.
I have the Mac version of Office, which is fine for most things, and LibreOffice fills the gap for a small handful of non-Excel tasks, but I do love Windows Excel for more complex spreadsheet tasks.
"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?!?!"
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.
We have found the limits of agentic engineering. Changing a logo on a website apparently takes weeks.
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.
Yoink, I'm stealing this quote!
This comment really put it into perspective to me. I wouldn't have phrased it better myself
Oh what the hell. This is the vibe coder mentality. Grift, as far as it goes
With all this discussion about Notepad++ finally being ported to Mac, I thought I’d drop a link to a previous attempt at a “port” that I’d heard of.
Notepad Next: https://github.com/dail8859/NotepadNext
It’s a (still work in progress) cross platform re-implementation of Notepad++.
It also predates agentic coding, if that’s something that concerns you.
Just needs to update the site to make it clear it's an independent port of the project. Then, modify the name to MacPad++ or something. Good to go.
TextEdit++ is a lot more fitting anyways.
To be clear in the GitHub thread Don Ho repeatedly encouraged him to do this, and said it was cool that he was trying to bring Notepad++ to Mac! Just don't make it look like Don Ho and the rest of the team is responsible for any quality issues. Don't use the logo!
"Objective-Notepad" was right there.
> "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++ ;-)
Objective C is a nice language, it's a shame it only really caught on because apple bought next
By the name the domain has probably use another domain too
I wish people wouldn't abuse the author of that project over this. Giving them the benefit of the doubt in that this was a mistake and not intentionally malicious, it feels really bad for hundreds if not thousands of people to send hate, insults, abuse to a single individual. Shame on the people who are doing that.
The only way you can consider this a mistake is by not having read the github comments here: https://github.com/notepad-plus-plus/notepad-plus-plus/issue...
Related discussions:
"Notepad++ for Mac – Independent community port" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47916964 27-apr-2026 85 comments
"Notepad++ Code Editor Comes to Mac After 20-Year Wait" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47947740 29-apr-2026 36 comments
Trademark is the one form of IP I genuinely appreciate (minus anything involving the International Olympic Committee). If I buy something labeled as a Coke, I want some strong assurances that it was made by the Coca-Cola company, not a fan who wanted to bring Coke to new venues. If I were to buy a Dell laptop, first, shoot me because I’ve lost my mind. But if I did, then I want to know it’s made by Dell Corp and not someone collecting parts off Alibaba. Trademarks benefit their owners, but they also benefit the customers.
Which is all to say this story is wild. Sorry, author, this is not Notepad++, and saying otherwise is lying to the end users. Don Ho has a reputation to protect as the real author. This fork has nothing to protect; it could embed a code exporter to shop all your stuff to North Korea without costing its author any rep, because they weren’t starting with any to begin with. I don’t know Ho, I don’t use Windows, and I’ve never used Notepad++, but this lie is dangerous to Ho, and the people using his stuff because they trust his name.
It’s rare you see an IP argument where one side is clearly legally and ethically correct. This is our one for the year, I suspect.
Original announcement and discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47916964
I dropped Notepad++ after their last malware issue^. I miss it, but I'm not going back. I can't believe anyone would trust this.
^ https://notepad-plus-plus.org/news/hijacked-incident-info-up...
it's nothing new. young people are ambitious and internet has been "claimed" by "last gen".
I have a project with only ~600 stars. someone approached me want to contribute an adjacent project to be part of "official suite" and do rev share on my donation, and she already purchased a domain with a different TLD.
Fortunately, she agreed with my recommendation of using her brand and maintain her own donation jar, she still owns that domain but not using it so far.
Could've just called it MacPad++ or something
Visiting the referenced website (https://notepad-plus-plus-mac.org/), the first thing I see is a big, green Announcement that says:
Did Don Ho really coordinated with this author?! If no then why he lies and he knows he is lying? Where this path leads to?! Really weird times to be alive!!coordination must mean, 'i've been threatened legally by'
Deepfaked software?
FFS. I installed it after seeing it here on HN and on MacRumors. Terrible failure on my part but MacRumors should offer an apology for endorsing this fake release.
This is such a blow for MacRumors... I won't be taking them seriously anymore after this. They are complicit.
A website that's specialized into running unconfirmed rumors for clicks, shocking!
9to5mac writes clickbait headlines but MacRumors violates journalistic integrity. They always have been worse, there’s nothing new.
You can’t take MacRumors seriously in that sense in general, they often distort their sources and barely do any journalistic due diligence. They are serviceable as a news feed for the sources they link to, and for the rumored-upcoming-features summary listicles.
The National Enquirer publishing rumors and gossip?! I'll never read them again!
Me neither. So far all I see is a puny "[Updated]" title on the article with no apology or indication of what was updated.
An apology? That'd be... breaking news /s
First thing I do is check official notepad++ website. I didn't see anything, that what's stop me.
Smart. Good on you for noticing it wasn’t the real website.
Same with heise online, Germany's largest IT news site:
https://web.archive.org/web/20260430011533/https://www.heise...
I mean, the website is called "Rumors", so their reliability is in compliance with the letter of the contract :-)
A similar thing happened for OTR recently. [1] Is the AI naming the vibe coded projects? Many of these are getting submitted to /newest
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47997919
Plenty of very thoughtful comments so far about copyright, community, developers who might not speak English as a first language, .... Very few people mentioning the obvious:
MALICIOUS BINARY!
Did we learn nothing from the xz malware fiasco? One update quietly pushed out at night while nobody's paying attention and boom.
I would not trust this "Notepad++ for Mac" at all. The author of the "port", aka Vibe Coded slop, Andrey Letov has absolutely zero commits anywhere before he suddenly vibes up this mac release. He brands it as an official Notepad++ version, is slimy in the way he interacts with the Notepad++ team etc. I would not be surprised if theres some sort of back door or malware attack vector embedded in this software. Stay away! Remember the XZ Utils backdoor!
Heck, even remember that state-level actors abused a flaw in NPP's update mechanism and hijacked NPP's hosting provider to deliver malware to specific targets: https://notepad-plus-plus.org/news/hijacked-incident-info-up...
There are a lot of NPP users out there, and probably the most important thing, given that they use it to edit all their files, is that they can trust the software. Some rando out of nowhere saying they've written "NPP for Mac" is red flag central.
This is so sloppy I really doubt this is an attempt at malware. It’s more likely the author is, uh, “socially unaware”.
So would you say that the Notepad++ author got Letov with a technicality?
Is notepad++ a registered trademark?
yes https://data.inpi.fr/marques/FR5133202
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?
You can enforce an unregistered trademark, but you need evidence that it’s actually yours. Registration makes that easier.
If a mac user is in France, does the software they use have to abide by French laws?
Software that is being distributed in France must abide by French laws.
"Enforce" yes but the point is that this fork clearly violates broader principles and conventions around respecting clearly active trademarks. Nobody is demanding a lawsuit in French court or any particular legal consequences. But it is totally valid and reasonable for an international company like Cloudflare to crack down on hosting his website: they have French customers.
Also it's really not a finder's-keeper's thing with trademarks and international borders. If someone trademarked Notepad++ in the US and released some janky port with the Notepad++ name, Don Ho could likely still win in US court. Most reasonably knowledgeable US consumers who are plausibly in the market for a Windows text editor are at least superficially familiar with "Notepad++" as the name of a well-regarded software product. I know we travel in certain circles, but there is a reason this guy wants to use "Notepad++" and not "MacnotePlus - A fork of Notepad++ for MacOS." It's a famous name.
That's not correct. You don't have to register a trademark in order for it to be protected, it's just recommended because if you do register it you don't have to separately prove that you have built up brand reputation. That should be pretty easy for a project as old and well-known as this though.
You're correct.
In very, very broad US-centric* strokes: Using a mark in trade is enough to establish a defensible trademark.
Registering a trademark can be useful, but it is also optional. At very least, registration helps make the ownership of the mark easier to discover and this can help everyone start on the right foot.
(* I'm not familiar at all with the laws of France, but that's fine: The alleged violation happened in New York.)
> In very, very broad US-centric* strokes: Using a mark in trade is enough to establish a defensible trademark.
Isn't that only if it's something that would actually qualify for a trademark?
For example, "Car Shop" or probably even "Hamburgers USA" would not qualify for a trademark due to being overly generic/descriptive (in many jurisdictions).
Now in Notepad++'s case the inclusion of the ++ obviously means it would indeed qualify.
Just asking as I'm sure there's people around here with personal experience around the topic, though again it can differ quite a bit by country.
Lots of very plain-looking things work as trademarks. Some obvious examples: AAA, BBB, Target, Just Do It.
There's a lot of nuance in trademarks, including geographical nuance. It's possible for someone to open a small bakery in Boise, Idaho named Bread Stuff and not conflict at all with an existing local bakery named Bread Stuff that operates in Fresno, California.
Having different uses can count, too. Moe's Barber Shop can be a defensible trademark, but that doesn't necessarily conflict at all with Moe's Car Parts across town.
Except: There's also a concept of well-known trademarks, which supercede some of these things. There's a place called Gold and Silver Pawn Shop, in Vegas. There was a time person could build a pawn shop in Somewhere Else Entirely with that same name, and that'd be fine. But now that the Pawn Stars TV series has made the place very famous, it's something that would almost certainly be shown to be a well-known mark if someone were naive enough to try to use that name for their own new pawn shop, today. The Vegas shop would almost certainly win that court battle.
I'd like to think that notepad++ is also a well-known mark by this point.
---
Anyway my intent earlier was just to help promote the concept of registration being optional-but-useful, not to write a book about trademarks. :)
And IANAL. I just got wrapped up in a trademark issue myself nearly 20 years ago, wherein I had been doing nothing wrong by using a name that another small company had been already been using in a very different market segment. Our uses were for very different things.
They subsequently got much bigger and arguably came to be well-known, and they wanted me to stop using that name. I had a valid case: I wasn't infringing when I started.
But I no money and no lawyers, while they had enough money and lawyers that there was no way I'd survive in court.
Hell, there was no way I'd even be able to afford to appear in court; I'd have lost by default and probably been required to pay for the whole mess. I was broke as fuck back then (I still am, but I was then, too).
But what I did have was some time, so I used that time to stuff my brain full of information about how trademarks work -- to prove to myself whether I had a leg to stand on as much as anything else.
I should have just given up. A sane person would have just washed their hands of it all and moved on. But I really liked the name I was using, and I am not always very sane.
It worked out OK, I guess: At the end of that very stressful time, I wound up giving them exactly what they wanted, and they ended up giving me some money in exchange. No courtroom was involved.
And now we're square. (And to be clear: I don't blame them at all for any of this. They're a good company. But even good companies are required to actively defend their trademark. Trademarks are not like patents: You need to use it, and actively defend it, or it is lost.)
Thank you for explaining this to me. That makes total sense!
How does it work when actual source license is GPL?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian%E2%80%93Mozilla_tradema...|
It is Mozilla public license, not GPL, but the story is the same.
Or look at CentOS (before it was acquired by RedHat)
The author is happy for people to fork etc, you just can't call it "notepad++" since that's trademarked
Yes
(posting my comment from the other thread) Hilarious. How long does it take to vibecode the requests to change the logo and name. Vibecoding a port from scratch is super fast as long as you don't need permission huh. Then when the adults ask you to not infringe on copyright, it's all "please be patient guys. I am boy. Give me one week pls."
Anyone from Moody's, BNY, AxiomSL, Amex. Who knew "Andrey Letov" and can contact him on his personal email/phone to verify?
Author of Mac notepad github repo claims he worked there, https://aletik.me/ (1 month old personal website), he also has new Github and new Linkedin. https://github.com/aletik
If someone has reverse image search platform, use his github profile picture. There is another Linkedin profile, with same guy, but slightly different picture.
becase there is only one Notepad.exe https://notepadexe.com on the mac
Why not just getting the changes/extensions upstream, welcome the Mac dev on the team, and make it an official port?
You don’t adopt an unofficial fork just because it exists. Showing up with a clone isn’t the same as meeting the standards required to be part of the original project
That might have been a possibility if brought forward in an open and reasonable way, a bit harder to trust someone once they just vibe adopted the project someone was working on for decades and didn't seen an issue with that. Also "just" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
The "author" couldn't tell you the why behind any of the original design decisions. It's vibecoded, they never had to know. They would be a terrible teammate with no actual understanding of the project.
Maybe there are trust issues now? I certainly would refuse to work with someone who comes and steals my brand, pretends I am on board with this and refuses to comply even after being called out.
Author of this Mac port has 1 month old online presence.
Nobody else has pointed this out, but a MacOS port of Notepad++ actually goes against some of the branding. Notepad++ very much markets itself as a lightweight and speedy thing that uses the low-level Win32 API directly. It is not just a native application, it is a Windows-native application. Porting it to macOS requires a level of care and expertise which is tantamount to changing the entire organization.
I am sure the Notepad++ team is perfectly fine focusing on Windows expertise and has no interest in bringing in the overhead of another OS. If a serious macOS expert wants to do that, they can fork the project with a different name.
BTW look at the GitHub issues. This is a lazy developer creating a slop project. It would be stupid to bring this incompetent and dishonest person on board.
It is astonishing how blatant people can be. How do they imagine they won't be immediately called out?
Hopefully the domain and the app on the app store gets taken down soon.
He probably didn't know it was trademarked, and probably didn't think people would get upset, and he's now trying to make it right. Why assume malice on this guy?
GP isn’t assuming malice, they are wondering how someone can be so foolish or naive.
> He probably didn't know it was trademarked
The fact it's trademarked provides the original project more legal protections, but regardless of whether or not a trademark is registered it's clearly unethical to use another project's name without prior permission. If it weren't a trademark violation, it'd still be wrong, so the knowledge of whether or not it was registered as a trademark is basically irrelevant.
> 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 see a Russian name, I assume very cavalier approach to copyright and trademark laws, especially if it is about someone else's copyright or trademark. This heuristic has had enough nines for me to qualify as 100% accurate.
Source: having been in ex-USSR through all of 1990s and 2000s.
Trademark laws? Copyright? Private property? Comrade, you must have hit your head hard, now quick, get the shovel, we need to load the coal in another truck for the glory of the Soviet Union!
Notepad++ is GPL, and this fork has followed the rules of that license.
Other GPL projects have unofficial forks that didn't change the name or logo for the software in the process, and it mostly seems fine. FreeBSD ports are probably a good example of these in the wild.
Listing the original author as an author of the port is a requirement of the GPL, and the language used on this website makes it clear that Dan is the original author of the Windows release, and not the developer of the Mac release.
The only thing I see as an issue here is how the author of the port, Andrey, has failed to directly indicate that this is an unofficial port anywhere on the website, and is promoting this as if it were official. He does seem to be some engaging in some shameless self-promotion, and I understand how the open source community would not appreciate someone vibe-porting a popular GPL tool, and then acting like they own part of the official project now.
In that respect, I do see a trademark violation.
> FreeBSD ports are probably a good example of these in the wild.
FreeBSD ports are nearly always tiny patches on a project together it to compile on that OS, and look for its config in /usr/local/etc instead of /etc. It is the original software plus minimal tweaks. Linux distros do the exact same thing. When you install a Debian package, you’re getting Debian’s patched version. Same for RedHat, Homebrew, and nearly every other package manager.
The fork we’re discussing here is a rewrite of the original in a different language while still calling it the original name.
Trademark violation is the problem. It is a sufficiently significant problem.
The app seems to be entirely vibe-coded. ("multi-agent AI development workflows are what make a one-person project at this scale practical")
However the author says he will "move from the branding".
I hope he calls it something like Notepad+++
typically trademark names that can be mistaken for another trademark in the same category are not allowed.
Ironically, like "notepad". I always find it odd how infringers feel ownership and get defensive about their infringement. Like release groups getting pissy about people reposting/renaming their releases.
Windows Notepad isn't a standalone product, but a Windows feature that has its title localized into every language as part of Windows, none of which are registered as a trademark.
And should it be considered a commercial product, Notepad alone is too generic so the trademark would probably be Windows/Microsoft Notepad, just like products named Something-Office both predate and followed Microsoft Office.
I suspect we will not see a non-vibe-coded app again. I think such days are in the past now.
Not to be confused with
https://notepadexe.com/
whats the point on doing that? is it a malware or some kind of trojan?
It's the Trump pattern: break all rules to benefit yourself until someone or something stops you. USA has not yet reached this clarity.
This is the same kind of situation as if Linus Torvalds accused Arch Linux in Linux trademark violation.
Otherwise, it looks a dishonest game: Notepad++ author gladly receives contributions from community, but he is not ok when the focus is shifted away from his persona, his project, and most importantly, his website.
At the end, it boils down to money: there are tons of ads on Notepad++ website, so having a competitive offering like "Notepad++ for Mac" threatens that business strategy.
So, while Notepad++ is GPL 2.0 de jure, de facto it's something else and has strings attached.
No, GPL gives you access to the source code, not the trademark. The reaction by the N++ author is perfectly in order.
I wasn’t even aware a native port was available for Mac. I tried it with Wine and it was awful. These days my colleagues and I are using Zed as the de facto high-performance text editor.