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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Honestly, the dude has added a disclaimer and agreed to change the name/logo/etc, giving the poor guy a few days to come up with a new name and register the URL doesn't seem a lot to ask. The dogpiling in that thread now seems especially unnecessary.
Yeah it's pretty clear that he's well-intentioned. There are plenty of ports of open source projects literally named "port of <trademarked name>" and generally the original authors don't mind. what even is the point of open source if you can't do that?
If I fork a repo on GitHub and the name of the project is trademarked, have I committed trademark violation?
In this case he just went a little too far by cloning the whole website. Even then tbh I still take his side because it's in the spirit of the Wild West Internet culture to have done something like this.
> 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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
> 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
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?
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.
(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."
Using the trademark is one thing. The authors brazen reaction another: https://github.com/notepad-plus-plus/notepad-plus-plus/issue...
The disclaimer he put up on the website is comical. "In coordination with [original author], I will be _evolving the brand_ to …"
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
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.
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.
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.
People react differently to feedback without necessarily bad intentions. Not everyone is ready to instantly admit mistakes. Empathy goes a long way.
A malicious actor would be happy to be publicly labeled inexperienced/naive.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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
It sounds like BS. Guy’s done it all if you believe his resume.
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.
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.
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.
Honestly, the dude has added a disclaimer and agreed to change the name/logo/etc, giving the poor guy a few days to come up with a new name and register the URL doesn't seem a lot to ask. The dogpiling in that thread now seems especially unnecessary.
Yeah it's pretty clear that he's well-intentioned. There are plenty of ports of open source projects literally named "port of <trademarked name>" and generally the original authors don't mind. what even is the point of open source if you can't do that?
If I fork a repo on GitHub and the name of the project is trademarked, have I committed trademark violation?
In this case he just went a little too far by cloning the whole website. Even then tbh I still take his side because it's in the spirit of the Wild West Internet culture to have done something like this.
> 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.
"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.
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
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.
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.
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++ ;-)
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
Original announcement and discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47916964
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
Why not just getting the changes/extensions upstream, welcome the Mac dev on the team, and make it an official port?
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.
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
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.
becase there is only one Notepad.exe https://notepadexe.com on the mac
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.
Same with heise online, Germany's largest IT news site:
https://web.archive.org/web/20260430011533/https://www.heise...
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!
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.
I mean, the website is called "Rumors", so their reliability is in compliance with the letter of the contract :-)
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?
> 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
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?
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.
Thank you for explaining this to me. That makes total sense!
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."
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 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/
It's the Trump pattern: break all rules to benefit yourself until someone or something stops you. USA has not yet reached this clarity.