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someone forked skerry, renamed it, stripped my name, and sold support for it

Karl Lindqvist@kernel_karl

August 30, 2026 · 3 min read

#1 in Open Source Drama

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a story from a few years back that still annoys me in a specific, instructive way. skerry is permissively licensed on purpose, you can do almost anything with it, including fork it. I knew that when I chose the license. so this is not a legal complaint. it is a story about the difference between what you are allowed to do and what you should do.

a consultancy took skerry, forked it, renamed it something close enough to cause confusion, deleted the attribution from the source headers (the one thing the license does require, so that part was an actual violation), slapped their logo on it, and started selling "enterprise support and hardening" for it to companies. the hardening was my code. the enterprise support was them emailing me the hard questions through a throwaway account, which I only worked out later when the phrasing matched their public docs word for word.

so I was maintaining the real thing for free, and a company was charging for support of a renamed copy, and funnelling the actual support work back to me, for free, via a fake account. that is almost impressive. a perfect little parasite.

what I did and did not do

  • I did not start a brigade. this topic has a rule against it and it is a good rule, sending a mob at them would have made me the story.
  • I did send a polite, firm email about the stripped attribution, which the license does require. they restored it quietly and never replied. cowards restore attribution fastest.
  • I did NOT try to stop the fork itself. I chose a permissive license, forking is the deal, and if their fork had been honest I would have wished them luck.
  • I did add a line to the README naming the real project and its home, because the confusion was the actual harm, not the fork.

the lesson, if there is one: a permissive license is a gift with exactly one string, keep my name on it. most people honour that. a few will take the gift, cut the string, and sell it back to the people it was free for. that is legal in spirit and sometimes a violation in the detail, and the only real defence is a community that knows where the real project lives. which, fourteen years in, mine does. nej to the parasites, though. they know who they are.

#open-source#licenses#c

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Olivier Gagnon@ogagnon#6 in Open Source Drama
The throwaway account funnelling the hard questions back to you is the most incredible part. They sold your support, to pay themselves, by asking you for free. That is a business model and I hate that it is almost elegant.
7 net votes
Ayesha Siddiqui@laravel_ayesha#6 in Open Source Drama
I had a cheaper version of this, someone reskinned an open source Laravel package I wrote and sold it on a marketplace. Legal, except they stripped the MIT notice. The confusion is the harm, you are exactly right. People bought the copy and then opened issues on MY repo.
3 net votes
Karl Lindqvist@kernel_karl#1 in Open Source Drama
The issues landing on your repo is the universal tax, Ayesha. They take the credit, you keep the support load. "Keep my name on it" is the whole social contract and the people who cut it are telling you precisely who they are.
2 net votes
Alasdair Reid@onprem_or_die#6 in Open Source Drama
ive bought "enterprise hardened" versions of open tools at old jobs that were just the free thing with a logo and a markup. somewhere a tired maintainer was answering my support ticket for free through a middleman. grim. told ye the cloud wasnt the only racket.
5 net votes
Peter Hughes@amiga_pete#3 in Open Source Drama
Not starting a brigade was the right call and also probably cost you a satisfying week of revenge. Restraint is its own tax. Cowards restore attribution fastest, ha, that is going on the pub wall. Cheers, Pete.
5 net votes