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Actix project postmortem

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Re: Actix project postmortem

#141

Post by j-pb »

dangerface wrote: post #103
j-pb wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In open source you give and take. The actix author almost certainly (unless they deploy their own kernel) has profited immensely from other peoples work. This is because as a community we have realized that we don't sell libraries, we sell stuff build with them, so we all win when we share. It is your choice to use open source software without open sourcing your own work or without contributing. But by engaging in op…

> has profited immensely from other peoples work Have they? how much $$$ profit did they make? You aren't paying for shit and yet you think they are making a profit and you are entitled to professional support? Wise up.

Making a profit != profiting.

I profit from Clojure, Python and the linux kernel. Doesn't mean I habe an income from their existence.

Nobody is arguing about professional support, but advertising a project and then deleting the entire thing to spite people is a jerk move.

Ready up!

Re: Actix project postmortem

#143

Post by lifthrasiir »

toyg wrote: post #46

I'll save this link for the next time someone tries to argue that the Rust community is somehow "more welcoming" than some other X community. All internet-based communities contain some assholes. All of them. Sadly some maintainers don't seem to have the werewithal to tell them to go away. I mean, when you get "asked to change coding style", it's the time to put the banhammer down, because there is no way to please t…

> I'll save this link for the next time someone tries to argue that the Rust community is somehow "more welcoming" than some other X community.

It's deeply disappointing to see this outcome (and r/rust is literally divided into two halves on this drama at least for now, ugh), but I believe it is the statement about the average atmosphere. Not that I have an argument for or against the refined statement, but it doesn't automatically get rejected with a single counterexample.

Re: Actix project postmortem

#144

Post by j-pb »

toyg wrote: post #111
j-pb wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In open source you give and take. The actix author almost certainly (unless they deploy their own kernel) has profited immensely from other peoples work. This is because as a community we have realized that we don't sell libraries, we sell stuff build with them, so we all win when we share. It is your choice to use open source software without open sourcing your own work or without contributing. But by engaging in op…

> The actix author almost certainly (unless they deploy their own kernel) ... or use Windows / MacOS / Solaris / any other commercial OS he paid for... > by engaging in open source you engage in a social contract You heck. You simply allow other people to use your work as they see fit. That's it. The only contract is the license, and the license is very explicit in denying the existence of any other tie, explicit or…

When you hold the door open for somebody you don't sign shit, yet it's implicit that you don't swing the door in their face.

Re: Actix project postmortem

#145

Post by z0mbie42 »

hocuspocus wrote: post #107
MatthewPhillips wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're right, it was unprofessional... but since the maintainer is not being paid this is not a professional project. It's a personal project. And this seems like a perfectly personal thing to do with something that's preventing happiness.

> It's a personal project. If you create an organization on GitHub for a project that is meant to remain personal, this kinda sends a wrong signal. Blaming some users for being rude and entitled, and then deleting an open source repo out of spite... it's a bit hard to feel sympathy for the guy here.

For information, the repo has not been deleted but simply moved: https://github.com/fafhrd91/actix-web

Re: Actix project postmortem

#146

Post by z0mbie42 »

Macha wrote: post #29
teddyh wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These kind of entitled attitude If you offer code to the public – and present it as an active, dependable project – professional behavior is exactly what you implicitly promise and signed up for . If you can’t offer that (at any time, and for any reason), then you should immediately make that clear, front-and-center, to any current and future users. It isn’t “entitlement” on part of the users – the users are making…

Or to put it another way: As an open source maintainer, you're perfectly entitled to just walk away. Hit that archive button on github so nothing new can come from the repo, and enjoy your life. Nobody could fault on you that. People would prefer you work out a clean transition to a new maintainer, but you have no obligation to do so. Deleting the repos is the equivalent of setting the house on fire on the way out (e…

The repo has not been deleted! https://github.com/fafhrd91/actix-web

Re: Actix project postmortem

#147

Post by saagarjha »

tastroder wrote: post #139
saagarjha wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case, the maintainer made an active and conscious decision to do something that did nothing but hurt everyone using the project. There are no passengers who might benefit here, sadly.

Since this seems to be a constant point in this thread but I don't see it: How exactly did that person hurt anybody? They maintained this project for 3(?) years and the code is readily available elsewhere on github now. If there's really that many people being inconvenienced by that, surely somebody else will take over that fork instead.

This person killed the momentum that this project had, much of which was only partly their work. Forks fracture a project’s community and pit the pieces against each other: occasionally they work out, but often they all just fizzle into nothingness. Keeping a project together has value. (Also, note that associated GitHub metadata such as issues has been wiped.)

Re: Actix project postmortem

#148

Post by beatgammit »

stefan_ wrote: post #43
3jckd wrote: post #4

Asking for a friend - could someone explain what happened there? The README doc is quite vague - it is more of a personal justification than a rationale (to me).

It seems like the overarching issue is that Rust is a house of cards. They added unsafe like Java has null. My favorite part is that you can declare a crate to forbid unsafe, but that then doesn't have to hold for it's dependencies. The obvious implementation is for unsafe to be infectious like const. You have unsafe code, your crate is unsafe. You depend on an unsafe crate, your crate becomes unsafe.

I wish there was a better way of handling that in Rust. You should be able to have a few markers in your code:

- uses unsafe - no unsafe, but dependencies may use unsafe - no unsafe, no dependencies except the standard library may use unsafe - no unsafe, not even in the standard library uses

The current situation is the second one, but many cases probably want the third, and occasionally the fourth.

The best part is, this should be fairly easily solved by crates.io upon submission (is there any use of unsafe and are all dependencies marked as strict or more strictly than yours?).

Re: Actix project postmortem

#149

Post by geofft »

mabbo wrote: post #119
geofft wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's absolutely correct that people don't have obligations simply by putting some code online. But they do have obligations when they start telling people to use their code. We understand this as humans even in realms far from open source: if I see you approaching a door, I am under no obligation to open it just because I'm physically able to, but if I open a door for you, I'd better hold it until you're finished wal…

> if I see you approaching a door, I am under no obligation to open it just because I'm physically able to, but if I open a door for you, I'd better hold it until you're finished walking through, or I'm a jerk. By holding the door open, I've made an implicit promise that I'm not going to close it on you. This reminds me of an incident years ago. I was on a city bus, very full of people, and we were just about to leav…

I think that's fair - especially the part about not taking advantage of generosity. But I don't think that's what happened here. Someone reported a soundness bug. Someone else (IIRC) posted a patch fixing it by switching from a custom Cell type to the standard library one, which is what the maintainer called uncreative and boring. Fixing a soundness bug is a perfectly reasonable, non-advantage-taking thing to do in a PR.

(I agree that in general there is a problem with open-source users feeling entitled to support/features and maintainers not feeling comfortable saying no, but that doesn't seem to be the type of incident that triggered this, and more generally it is difficult for me to see how a patch would count as that - at least a patch that isn't "please maintain this pile of new code," which this one wasn't.)

Re: Actix project postmortem

#150

Post by toyg »

j-pb wrote: post #144
toyg wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The actix author almost certainly (unless they deploy their own kernel) ... or use Windows / MacOS / Solaris / any other commercial OS he paid for... > by engaging in open source you engage in a social contract You heck. You simply allow other people to use your work as they see fit. That's it. The only contract is the license, and the license is very explicit in denying the existence of any other tie, explicit or…

When you hold the door open for somebody you don't sign shit, yet it's implicit that you don't swing the door in their face.

But you don't hold a door: you are dropping a package on the street and letting people pick it up. Anyone can reuse the cardboard, paint it red, stack it up with other packages, or hang it on their livingroom walls... but there is no guarantee that the package won't contain a bomb, that the cardboard was made by eco-friendly methods, or that it will last one second after getting dropped on the streets.
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