I've seen this kind of thing happen even with very small projects, where there's no marketing department or business goal attached. I've seen attempts to erase the history of forks, projects repurposed from others in order to retain GitHub stars unrelated to the repo's new purpose... not for a supply chain attack or something like that, but out of sheer vanity. Sometimes I see people talk about those projects on HN, and if you weren't there when it happened and very interested in some very niche software at the time, you'd never know.

It's a wild world.

It's all about marketing sadly. Marketing and connections. This industry has been full of theft for years.

Some 15 years ago, I made a small configuration language:

https://github.com/Respect/Config/blob/master/docs/README.md

Then, two years later, toml (by a GitHub founder) appeared. It is almost an exact clone of it.

https://github.com/toml-lang/toml

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You could say that is just a coincidence, and it's an obvious idea that anyone could have had.

But then again, also around that time, a sibling component for the configuration language was featured on "The Changelog" (then, a very popular website featuring interesting projects).

https://changelog.com/posts/validation-the-most-awesome-vali...

It stayed on trending PHP repositories for months.

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So, either toml was stolen or I independently invented it years prior.

Don't do easy to implement DSLs kids, there's no way of licensing them.

By the way, no hard feelings.

The best thing that happened with my early projects was the local community I was able to help build here in Brazil.

I've seen many local contributors that helped with my early projects do things well beyond what their dreamt of at the time, and I'm sure I had a positive influence on the careers of many people. All with honest, simple hard work.

I am sure many people remember I did some things first, and without any investment or marketing attached to it. Just a kid, making things.

To me, that is worth a lot more than VC money.

Isn't that itself just a variation on the ini syntax, sort of made concrete by PHP, itself adapted from DOS? https://www.php.net/parse_ini_file

Yes. I think this also supports my case.

For me, it was obvious to use `parse_ini_file` because it greatly improved performance (I didn't had to parse it by hand) and familiarity (PHP users already know ini).

On the other hand, there is no reason for toml to have chosen ini. Almost no other language had efficient ini parsers at the time, or any culture related to ini files whatsoever. It sounds like a strange choice outside the PHP context.

Python’s built in ConfigParser has an ini like syntax and was widely used.

Fair point. It would have made sense from a python perspective also.

If it weren't Alan Kay would be a household name and Jobs would've crashed out, Microsoft would've been a never been and amazing Xerox would be the tech juggernaut instead of copier washout.

Truly a strange world.