Zigbook Is Plagiarizing the Zigtools Playground

original submission dicussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45947810

since zig is famously decentralized, i don't think there is a way to effectively combat bad actors like these? there is no "official zig org" that can disown them

In a decentralized but communicating community, this kind of post is raising awareness, and then the others in the community will make their own choices regarding the matter.

I wonder what tools the Zig team has to deal with trolls like this.

Is the zig name or logo trademarked? What about the mascot he's using as his github picture?

They're violating the terms of the MIT license as mentioned in the article, so maybe Zigtools has legal standing.

As for lying about no AI, being an asshole isn't illegal, so no angle there.

Any other ideas I missed?

Its the opposite in my understanding. Zig has a BDFL.

Trademarks are the usual cudgel of choice to enforce a bad actor claiming to be part of offcial Zig.

Who cares? They aren't selling it.

Misinformation and poor learning tools can do real damage to the experience of new zig users, which is incredibly meaningful.

Plagiarism is a moral wrong.

But copyright infringement is a legal wrong (a civil liability).

Is what they're doing infringing on a copyrighted work? Or does it fail to uphold license terms? Many open source licenses have some amount of attribution as a requirement, so that'd be something to consider.

I just can't get over how ridicioulus the "no ai" statement is.

I really love the part where llm.txt has the same notice, something humans will never read, or the fact that llm.txt exists considering that there is distaste for AI in every part of this llm generated book.

It's addressed in the post. MIT license. Zigbook is not honoring the attribution requirement. A PR to change that was closed and obfuscated.

Neither are the Zigtools folks. If you've ever run an open source project, you know that instead of running on money, they run on community goodwill. Having people take the project's creation, claim it as their own, and not comply with the license, are all damaging to people's motivation to contribute.

Had a conversation with the Zigbook maintainer. It’s either a young kid or somebody that has some serious growing up to do. Just generally weird behavior.

Playground wise, is Zigs wasm compiler able to compile out simd wasm in the browser? I'm trying to find the best languages that can. So far it's just assemblyscript and c/c++ and their compilers are big.

I remember reading the original zig book post and how weird it smelt. Even though it’s LLM written there’s more than a trivial amount of effort put into it. What could anyone possibly have to gain by doing this?

Lying potentially opens up fraud angles if they are soliciting or receiving something of value. Maybe false advertising even they are giving it away for free. A lot of this will depend on who has jurisdiction

Censorship is even worse

@Zigtools:

Thank you for your educative post, letting the community know.

Don't let it to drag you down in any way. This is emotionally draining and takes away motivation, but keep going.

Indeed: @zigbook changed the title "Fix license violations" "Im mad because you wrote code similiar to mine >:(" 3 minutes ago (https://github.com/zigbook/zigbook/pull/43)

But he isn’t. He’s just writing an AI slop book about Zig. Surely there’s nothing legally wrong with that? He never said it’s an official book or backed by the Zig project.

The trademark cudgel is used on people who release an incompatible language that they insist on calling Zig, confusing people who want to try Zig. Or people who add malware to the Zig tool chain and try to distribute that.

Trademark can’t be used to control bad actors like zigbook.

It turns out a language whose leader calls JavaScript programmers “Monkeys” ended up attracting immature people, who would have thought?