I think if you take a step back and try to fight against confirmation bias you'll see that the arguments you're making are very weak.

You are also moving the goal posts. You started with it was sketchy to claim a namespace now you're moving to it's sketchy to own domains. Of course people are going to buy variants on their domains.

This is easily in the top 5 most toxic moments in open source, and off the top of my head seems like #1. For all you know this is some kid in a country with a terrible job market trying to create a resource for the community and get their name out there. And the Zig community tried to ruin his life because they whipped themselves into a frenzy and convinced themselves there were secret signs that an AI might have been used at some point.

I've never seen an open source community gang up like that to bully someone based on absolutely no evidence of any wrong doing except forgetting to include an attribution for 22 lines of code. That's the sort of issue that happens all the time in open source and this is the first time I've seen it be used to try to really hurt someone and make them personally suffer. The intentional cruelty and the group of stronger people deliberately picking on a weaker person is what makes it far worse to me than the many other issues in open source of people behaving impolitely.

This is an in-group telling outsiders they're not welcome and, not only that, if we don't like you we'll hurt you.

And yes there have been repeated mentions of their interest in crypto, including in this thread.

The claims of AI use were unsubstantiated and pure conjecture, which was pointed out by people who understand language, including me. Now it appears that the community has used an MIT attribution violation to make the Zigbook author a victim of DMCA abuse.

That doesn't look great to me. It doesn't look like a community I would encourage others to participate in.

> tried to claim a namespace on open-vsx

It seems reasonable for the zigbook namespace to belong to the zigbook author. That's generally how the namespaces work right? https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Aeclipse%2Fopenvsx+namespa... https://github.com/eclipse/openvsx/wiki/Namespace-Access. IMO, this up there with the "but they were interested in crypto!" argument. The zigbook author was doing normal software engineer stuff, but somehow the community tries to twist it into something nefarious. The nefariousness is never stated because it's obviously absurd, but there's the clear attempt to imply wrongdoing. Unfortunately that just makes the community look as if they're trying hard to prosecute an innocent person in the court of public opinion.

> At a certain point, that starts to look outright malicious.

Malicious means "having the nature of or resulting from malice; deliberately harmful; spiteful". The Zig community looks malicious in this instance to me. Like you, I don't have complete information. But from the information I have the community response looked malicious, punitive, harassing and arguably defamatory. I don't think I've ever seen anything like it in any open source community.

Again, prior to the MIT attribution claim there was no evidence the author of Zigbook had done anything at all wrong. Among other things, there was no evidence they had lied about the use of AI. Malicious and erroneous accusations of AI use happen frequently these days, including here on HN.

Judging by the strength of the reaction, the flimsiness of the claims and the willingness to abuse legal force against the zigbook author, my hunch is that there is some other reason zigbook was controversial that isn't yet publicly known. Given the timing it possibly has to do with Anthropic's acquisition of Bun.

You can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the actual claim was that Zigbook had not complied with the MIT license's attribution clause for code someone believed was copied. MIT only requires attribution for copies of "substantial portions" of code, and the code copied was 22 lines.

Does that count as substantial? I'm not sure because I'm not a lawyer, but this was really an issue about definitions in an attribution clause over less code than people regularly copy from stack overflow without a second thought. By the time this accusation was made, the Zigbook author was already under attack from the community which put them in a defensive posture.

Now, just to be clear, I think the book author behaved poorly in response. But the internet is full of young software engineers who would behave poorly if they wrote a book for a community and the community turned around and vilified them for it. I try not to judge individuals by the way they behave on their worst days. But I do think something like a community has a behavior and culture of its own and that does need to be guided with intention.

I say this as someone who has been cautioning about Microsoft's ownership of GitHub for years now... but the Zig community has been high drama lately. I thought the Rust community had done themselves a disservice with their high tolerance of drama, but lately Zig seems to me to be more drama than even Rust.

I was saddened to see how they ganged up to bully the author of the Zig book. The book author, as far as I could tell, seems like a possibly immature teenager. But to have a whole community gang up on you with pitch forks because they have a suspicion you might use AI... that was gross to watch.

I was already turned off by the constant Zig spam approach to marketing. But now that we're getting pitchfork mobs and ranty anti-AI diatribes it just seems like a community sustaining itself on negative energy. I think they can possibly still turn it around but it might involve cleaning house or instituting better rules for contributors.

It's true that it's about totalitarianism to some extent. But we have Orwell's actual words here that it's chiefly about communism

> [Nineteen Eighty-Four] was based chiefly on communism, because that is the dominant form of totalitarianism, but I was trying chiefly to imagine what communism would be like if it were firmly rooted in the English speaking countries, and was no longer a mere extension of the Russian Foreign Office.

And of course Animal Farm is only about communism (as opposed to communism + fascism). And the lesser known Homage to Catalonia depicts the communist suppression of other socialist groups.

By all this I just mean to say when you're reading Nineteen Eighty-Four what he's describing is barely a fictionalization of what was already going on in the Soviet Union. There's just not a lot in the book that is specifically Nazi or Fascist.

I don't have any opinion on whether he thought there were non-totalitarian forms of communism.