The Hugo theme that was announced yesterday on Twitter, Launch Page, is a modified version of my own theme, Lean Launch Page. Not only is it apparent in the design of the theme itself, but if you look at the theme’s README, it’s practically a straight copy off my project.
Now as I released my theme under the MIT license, this person has every right to modify and redistribute my theme. That’s fine. However they removed my original copyright from the theme which is a violation of the MIT license.
Not only is removing my copyright against the rules and messed up, they didn’t fork it on GitHub either further hiding the fact that their theme is based on previous work.
I would like for their theme to be removed and maybe if they followed the MIT license, readded. Though, I’ve already lost respect for the person.
this is obviously a copy of your theme and I agree with Bjørn Erik that it should be removed. And it doesn’t add any significant changes too your theme.
I should looker closer but with nearly 200 themes it’s sometimes hard to keep track of all of them.
This theme was added by pros (a consultancy firm with the slogan “Consulting done right” or something like that). They should have known better. We remove the theme and it will not be re-added.
Since I understand the original author’s frustration, Feliciano’s, I just want to make clear it was an error and we apologize for this, in behalf of my name and binomads. company.
I’ll also add this error case to the theme itself in order to let other people know how copied source code damages authors; how it happened, why, and how it got solved and communicated.