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Faker.js is now a community controlled project

fakerjs.dev

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Re: Faker.js is now a community controlled project

#151

Post by [deleted] »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #126
throwaway858 wrote: post #10

It doesn't feel like there was enough criticism against GitHub for their decision to ban the developer of faker/colors. This was his own corner of the internet for him to publish his own personal projects. I understand the decision for npm to take ownership of his packages, because npm is a community package repository owned by, and for, the community. All community package repositories have some sort of policy for p…

I am completely baffled by folks defending Marak, or putting any sort of blame on GitHub. What Marak did was not "political speech". If he wanted to, he could have easily done any of the following: 1. Pulled down his repo, or replace his repo by whatever message he wanted to send. 2. Output his political message during the build. 3. Heck, all faker.js does is output fake data for things like names and addresses. I th…

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Re: Faker.js is now a community controlled project

#152

Post by chillfox »

zbrozek wrote: post #31
chillfox wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get what you are saying, but I feel like this applies: Not your domain/site, not your corner of the internet.

Is domain enough? I doubt it. You probably also need your own server in your own rack in your own building with your own peering to other networks. Once you've done all of that, you can probably credibly keep your site up counter to corporate interests.

Well, if you have your own domain then you can at least move it around between providers. But yeah, if you are doing anything truly unpopular then I don't think there's much you can do to stay online.

Re: Faker.js is now a community controlled project

#153

Post by syshum »

smt88 wrote: post #136
syshum wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you are going to get is people separating out into 2 camps, those that believe in individuality, and those that believe in more collectivism. This is a divide that extends well beyond programming and this topic. People that support GitHub actions believe in the concept of "greater good" and believe the actions of GitHub are ethical because it prevented harm to the community People that oppose GitHub actions reje…

> What you are going to get is people separating out into 2 camps, those that believe in individuality, and those that believe in more collectivism. I am extremely individualistic. Github is also an "individual" that has its own private rights. The author of this library absolutely had the right to write code, change it, etc. He does not have the right to use Github as a delivery mechanism for malware.

Had github simply banned the person, and took down their code I might have even sided with your position

However that is not what github did.

Re: Faker.js is now a community controlled project

#154

Post by chasd00 »

syshum wrote: post #78
young_unixer wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By putting them on a social network, like Github, he is submitting to their whims. He doesn't have any legal right to stay on that site if they want to kick him off of it. Of course, legally speaking, Github can do whatever they want with their website, but we're not talking about the legal aspect. The developer community has put some trust on Github not to do whatever they want. It's an implicit, non-legal, non-en…

What you are going to get is people separating out into 2 camps, those that believe in individuality, and those that believe in more collectivism. This is a divide that extends well beyond programming and this topic. People that support GitHub actions believe in the concept of "greater good" and believe the actions of GitHub are ethical because it prevented harm to the community People that oppose GitHub actions reje…

I have a feeling bare metal servers, a leased spot in a cage, and self hosted systems is about to become popular. There are just too many stories like this these days.

I’m in the camp that if it was his repo then he can do whatever the eff he wants to it.

Re: Faker.js is now a community controlled project

#156

Post by [deleted] »

smoldesu wrote: post #131
labster wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s cool that you’re internet rules-lawyering and all but ultimately he used his free account with intent to harm others, just as surely as if he backdoored his code. Freedom of speech is good, and protest is fine, but why would GitHub amplify the speech of a nutso who abused his position of trust?

They don't have to amplify anything. This is why open source is valuable; if the current maintainer is considered to be unfit or unreliable in some way, the community that disagrees with their rhetoric/leadership can fork the package and keep going like nothing happened. If you don't care/the package is still usable, then ideally no further action has to be taken. At no point down the road should that involve revokin…

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Re: Faker.js is now a community controlled project

#157

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

encryptluks2 wrote: post #60
shadowgovt wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, GitHub's actions here have in no way damaged my trust in them. They interpreted a developer's attempt to harm the community via abuse of the trust the community had placed in him as damage and mitigated it in the short run. That's a value-add.

Value add in to who? It sounds like you believe open source developers owe something to someone which simply isn't the case. You should evaluate the license(s): THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIA…

I'm just as much an armchair lawyer as the most of the rest of HN but my understanding is that liability waivers aren't considered enforceable if malicious intent or gross negligence is involved. Anybody with more legal expertise want to clarify?

Re: Faker.js is now a community controlled project

#158

Post by Gigachad »

chaostheory wrote: post #49
kemitchell wrote: post #34

This strikes me as hyper-defensive exercise in wrapping the lib thick with every cheap trapping of "community" to hand. I suspect because of the Open Collective handover. In the end, this thing spits out strings. Does it need eight maintainers, only a few of whom had commits, in low double digits? Does it need its own GitHub org, Twitter account, and Google .dev domain? Addressing open pull requests could be good, bu…

Marak isn’t the only one who snapped, but he’s the only one to my knowledge who has introduced malicious commits to this code to purposely hurt other people’s projects. (Even Hans Reiser didn’t do that.) It seems that this might have been a precursor to Marak attempting to hurt people in real life " Hospitalized Queens man charged with reckless endangerment after cops find bomb-making materials in his home " https://…

I don't think what he did was particularly good but I think he was entitled to do it. And the blame falls on the system we have which relies on random people to do work for free with no contract or obligation.

It's like if a business delivered packages by asking some random homeless person on the street to walk it to its destination. And then one day the person just chucks your package in the river instead of delivering it. It's amazing that the company got so much value out of a free service for so long rather than shocking that it eventually didn't work.

Re: Faker.js is now a community controlled project

#159

Post by wonnage »

thrdbndndn wrote: post #93
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's the sponsors' decision to make. Marak's GitHub sponsors aren't changed. If people wanted to specifically sponsor Marak, they would have chosen to do it there. The Open Collective is very specifically about the project, not a specific person. > What I don't agree is to transfer its sponsors to an account that has zero relationship with original account. The current fakerjs has more of a relationships with the…

Do you also have no issue if GitHub just transfers Marak's repo to the new team? Or all the stars? Since obviously most of people are starring the "project" not him.

Kinda pointless to argue about this because it didn't happen.

Re: Faker.js is now a community controlled project

#160

Post by mbreese »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #53
mbreese wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you cancel the sponsorships to the project and notify the supporters. When the maintainer effectively cancels the project, this makes sense. But you don’t migrate supporters automatically over to a brand new project (even if it is the most stable fork of the original). > We came to the determination that users unfamiliar with the whole Faker situation wouldn't know that the repository's sponsorship links aren't…

> but you are relying on people (who were never aware of the switch and the new fork) being okay with this, without their consent. Open Collective makes it clear that the sponsorship is for the project, not for a specific person. It's not "without their consent". It's literally the terms of the Open Collective.

But they are changing the “project”. Just because the new project is named “Faker-JS” doesn’t make it “official”.

Does the open collective have the ability to decide who is in charge of a project? Can they remove maintainers?

Let’s say there is a fork of a different popular project. Are you suggesting that they could they unilaterally decide to support the fork over the original project? However unlikely that is, I don’t think they have that power. Decertifying a project? Sure. Redirecting funding to a new project (even a fork), just isn’t right.

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