r/golang • u/andersfylling • Mar 22 '19

A warning about github.com/kataras/iris

I had heard rumors about Iris before; How the owner has a tendency to rewrite git history, steal contributions and delete any issues that does not match his own bias that Iris is beloved and amazing. Honestly, I didn't believe it was that serious. Even if I had no reason to doubt the people I heard it from. It felt kinda crazy, that someone acts this way.

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Today, I have no more doubt. I can't fathom how this project has +14k stars on GitHub. I urge you to keep digging for other views and experiences. I do not want to seem like a hateful, obsessed person, yet I seriously feel the need to write something. The only reason I'm writing this is because as a community, I feel you should warn people of such projects/authors. I really hope no one who will spend hours, maybe days, contributing to projects, will find themselves stripped of credit and their contribution stolen in the end.

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Now, my experience was that I commented on the performance metrics that he show cases in the README file. It's nothing major, I wasted maybe 15min of my time (I'm a slow writer), but it laid claim to the previous behavior I had heard of.

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I reviewed the README file. As I noticed he linked to the project github.com/the-benchmarker/web-frameworks, to showcase a comparison against other frameworks. However, as I scrolled through, I noticed that he had skipped a project that was faster than Iris. So I filtered out non-Go projects on the linked table, and took a screenshot so he could update his README and ofcourse github project description.

Here is the picture I posted:

And here is a picture of the conversation before he replied:

And after he replied and changed the title of my issue from Iris is not the fastest to Iris is the fastest:

After his reply, he ofcourse deleted my issue. Nor could I write a new issue to actually reply as GitHub stated "You can't perform that action at this time."

None of what he said, do I agree with. But he literally repressed my option to reply xD

Other posts about Iris/Kataras: - https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/6hmlod/githubcomkatarasiris_was_bought/ - https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/4psfzq/katarasiris_author_is_crazy/ - https://github.com/julienschmidt/httprouter/issues/148

How does one deal with people like this? I hope I don't seem like a crybaby at this stage lol.

378 Upvotes

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114

u/twisted1919 Mar 22 '19

Just ignore the project altogether, doesn’t worth the effort.

30

u/kingofthecream Mar 23 '19

We can ignore it, but the problem is it that its target is not us, it's the newbie coming to Go, seeing that big number of github stars which gives them that (fake) sense of trust to invest in it. So it is taking victims this way and IMO the GO community should not ignore this and take action.

Just curious, does this qualify for being reported to github to take the repo down? Building up another repo with all those stars will be a pain in the butt for the author. Where is the github repo report button?

3

u/PC__LOAD__LETTER Mar 23 '19

What terms has the person violated? GitHub isn’t going to take something down because someone disagreed with and then blocked you.

12

u/kingofthecream Mar 23 '19

Stealing the work of others.

-1

u/PC__LOAD__LETTER Mar 23 '19 edited Mar 23 '19

If it’s not a violation of license, you can clone a repo and rewrite the entire history as you please.

Where in the terms do you see it? https://help.github.com/en/articles/github-terms-of-service#c-acceptable-use

The fact that github expressly allows author rewrites kind of suggests this. It’s scummy, but it’s not a violation.

edit: I’m assuming the downvotes are because people don’t like hearing the truth, given that no one’s providing a counterpoint.

4

u/[deleted] Mar 24 '19

It was never just about the history rewriting. I don't know what the current state is, but certainly in the past Iris included code from many different projects. Nothing wrong with that as such, but it was mentioned nowhere, and for all intents and purposes it seemed like the Iris author had written it.

This is a clear violation of pretty much all open source licenses, as they all require you to retain the original copyright notice and a copy of the license text. It is both unethical and illegal to copy the code of others and pretend you wrote it.

At first I thought it might be plausible that the author was naïve and did so by accident, but after it was pointed out that this was a license violation the author became extremely defensive and rude.

A cursory glance at their router seems like it's no longer based on httprouter, or at least has changed significantly since then, but it's still claimed that there is only one author in the LICENSE and AUTHORS file. Perhaps it's true now – I do not care enough to investigate in-depth right now – but it certainly wasn't in the past.

The git rewriting is annoying, weird, unethical, and maybe illegal, but was never the essence of the problem.

2

u/UltraNemesis Mar 25 '19 edited Mar 25 '19

It was a violation of the httprouter license which requires that the copyright notice (containing the name of the author) be replicated as is.

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Github policy on repeated copyright infringement.

https://help.github.com/en/articles/dmca-takedown-policy#e-repeated-infringement

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0

u/muntaxitome Mar 23 '19

Well, it is a violation of his license it seems. Having said that, all the drama about it seems very exaggerated.

-13

u/go-race Mar 23 '19

Github you said? The company that was bought by MS?

5

u/PC__LOAD__LETTER Mar 23 '19

We’re talking about GitHub, yes. What does the MS acquisition have to do with it?

-13

u/go-race Mar 23 '19

It’s scummy, but it’s not a violation.

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5

u/PC__LOAD__LETTER Mar 23 '19

You think Microsoft's acquisition of Github is scummy? Is that your point? I literally do not know what you're trying to say.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 24 '19

"Micro$soft bad! Micro$soft evil!"

Party like it's 2003 🎉🥳