There is no official XScreenSaver GitHub repository

(github.com)

57 points | by st_goliath 3 hours ago

12 comments

  • metropolis_pt2 8 minutes ago
  • bcvvvy 1 hour ago
    GitHub is not authoritative and never should be considered as authoritative. Anyone can publish your stuff on there as your name.

    It’s a huge problem. Glad to see he’s at least put a placeholder on there.

  • throwfaraway135 9 minutes ago
    pros of having a Github repo:

    * people can find your project easily

    * stars are a pretty good indicator of authenticity

    * you can browse, search code right away

    * a place for people to contact you

    cons:

    * some maintenance

    * people have a place to contact you

  • altairprime 2 hours ago
    The only thing missing is to mark it as Archived so that all of the GitHub features are turned off.
  • amiga386 1 hour ago
    Jeff Merkey is the person claiming the "xscreensaver" organisation on GitHub, despite it not being, and never has been, his project.

    He has promised to drop that and move the repo to /hisname/xscreensaver, but only if JWZ flatters his ego first. Sounds like he knows he's squatting on someone else's good name, but thinks he's so clever and well versed in trademark law that he'd be deliberately antagonistic all the way to the end of a huge legal bill. Just to force him to do the right thing.

    He knows what the right thing is and could do it at any time, but just look at his priors and tell me he'll do that:

    https://www.dmlp.org/threats/merkey-v-does

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitra...

  • hndhyc0bdt 10 minutes ago
    [flagged]
  • throwaway2037 1 hour ago
    [flagged]
  • createful 2 hours ago
    So what's the point of making a GitHub if you're not going to publish source code? Is this an inside joke?
    • Svip 27 minutes ago
      May be also be relevant to link to JWZ's post about it: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/10/gitsquatting/
      • barrkel 9 minutes ago
        You cannot hotlink to jwz; he will redirect you to a testicle in an eggcup based on referer header.
      • kouosi 17 minutes ago
        it looks like the site is offline :(
        • lbriner 4 minutes ago
          You need to open it incognito to avoid the Hacker News insult image!
        • scbrg 12 minutes ago
          jwz also famously special cases traffic from hacker news. You may have better luck if you copy & paste the link to avoid sending referrer headers.
    • nevon 1 hour ago
      To prevent impersonation and having people download potential malware from repositories posing as the official xscreensaver distribution channel.
  • cookiengineer 2 hours ago
    Instead of providing a mirrored repository, they decided to intentionally not fixing the correctly identified problem while simultaneously still living 30 years in the past.

    Setting up a git mirror that auto syncs takes less than 2mins of effort. And way less time than writing up this README that's just there to lecture people. If it's about disagreement with github, there's also better alternatives.

    You can still setup the mirror and be done with it, and put the original repo links at the top in the README.

    • st_goliath 1 hour ago
      The upstream has no public repository, neither on GitHub nor anywhere else.

      JWZ might not even use git in the first place, the source might be in a local SVN repo, or just a series of tarballs and patches, assuming it is version controlled at all.

    • cxr 1 hour ago
      > You can still setup the mirror and be done with it, and put the original repo links at the top in the README

      There is no original repo to link to. That's why the README says that there isn't one.

      > Setting up a git mirror that auto syncs takes less than 2mins

      Prove it.

    • pil0u 2 hours ago
      It's obvious that the author wants to make a statement, and has their own reason to not expose their work on GitHub. Setting up a mirror would probably contradict these reasons.
    • mykhamill 1 hour ago
      Right now, I would love to live 30 years in the past.
    • bcvvvy 48 minutes ago
      Using a public source code hosting product is a choice.

      Also centralising everything in one place is a seriously bad idea.

    • antiloper 1 hour ago
      > they decided to intentionally not fixing the correctly identified problem

      Which problem?

    • messe 2 hours ago
      > Maybe someone should fork xscreensaver as xscreensaver-ng as a community project?

      Feel free.

    • sick_of_slop 1 hour ago
      Or they could not. It’s their project they can do what they want you are not entitled to their labour.
  • ytxm 38 minutes ago
    Opening with the word "I" and continuing in that manner is the real reason there's no official xscreensaver repository