Can someone elucidate why he is so against "his" code being used in this project?
“Please don't add any of my stuff to this project”
11–20 of 363 posts
Re: “Please don't add any of my stuff to this project”
#12Really seems like you need to respect the author’s wishes here, but the tension between author and community can get complicated with FOSS. Open source is a contract with your audience that the code can be used freely. Authors gain their audience because of that contract, so there’s some obligation for them to respect that. That said, respect flows both ways, and I’ve had FOSS code get repackaged to steal credit whic…
> Open source is a contract with your audience that the code can be used freely. Not in common-law jurisdictions, where an open source license without consideration is a bare license and can be revoked at will by the licensor.
I shouldn’t have used the term “contract” there because I was thinking more about interpersonal obligation than legal obligation.
Re: “Please don't add any of my stuff to this project”
#13Really seems like you need to respect the author’s wishes here, but the tension between author and community can get complicated with FOSS. Open source is a contract with your audience that the code can be used freely. Authors gain their audience because of that contract, so there’s some obligation for them to respect that. That said, respect flows both ways, and I’ve had FOSS code get repackaged to steal credit whic…
The author's wishes are formally and legally specified in the copyright license to the code he wrote, which is MIT and allows redistribution. Everything else is simply noise. Once you make your software free, it isn't yours any longer and your opinions about it (or what others do with it) aren't relevant.
While I don't disagree with you, the problem the author is saying is that end users don't realize that, and contact the author directly even when they are using an out-of-date package from a distribution, and the author doesn't have an immediate way to determine whether the problem is with their code at the version they released, or an older packaged version.
While it's technically true that a free software author owes nothing to any of their users, it's a legitimate problem that there's no good way to selectively offer help and support to those getting the software directly but not to those getting it from a package.
Re: “Please don't add any of my stuff to this project”
#14Really seems like you need to respect the author’s wishes here, but the tension between author and community can get complicated with FOSS. Open source is a contract with your audience that the code can be used freely. Authors gain their audience because of that contract, so there’s some obligation for them to respect that. That said, respect flows both ways, and I’ve had FOSS code get repackaged to steal credit whic…
The author's wishes are formally and legally specified in the copyright license to the code he wrote, which is MIT and allows redistribution. Everything else is simply noise. Once you make your software free, it isn't yours any longer and your opinions about it (or what others do with it) aren't relevant.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
The project could have pinned the version and downloaded from pypi rather than repackaging.
This isn’t a situation of “can do” it was “is it nice to do.”
And the author mentioned that he’s changing the license to prevent it so it no longer becomes possible legally.
I typically don’t like authors demanding stuff outside their license, but this started as a simple technical/community request to not do something dumb and escalated.
Re: “Please don't add any of my stuff to this project”
#15I am reminded of jwz, debian, and xscreensaver (Not linking to jwz's blog from HN because... he doesn't want it to be.)
Re: “Please don't add any of my stuff to this project”
#16Can someone elucidate why he is so against "his" code being used in this project?
The package author lays out the reasons in his comments
Re: “Please don't add any of my stuff to this project”
#17Can someone elucidate why he is so against "his" code being used in this project?
He says early in the thread:
> If users experiencing issues with the ambee library in this package, they will knock on my door. And I'm not willing to support that or accept that burden. Especially as I don't see a good repacking reason in this case.
Re: “Please don't add any of my stuff to this project”
#18Really seems like you need to respect the author’s wishes here, but the tension between author and community can get complicated with FOSS. Open source is a contract with your audience that the code can be used freely. Authors gain their audience because of that contract, so there’s some obligation for them to respect that. That said, respect flows both ways, and I’ve had FOSS code get repackaged to steal credit whic…
The author's wishes are formally and legally specified in the copyright license to the code he wrote, which is MIT and allows redistribution. Everything else is simply noise. Once you make your software free, it isn't yours any longer and your opinions about it (or what others do with it) aren't relevant.
As the author says, that can be fixed with a relicensing.
Just because you're legally entitled to be a pain doesn't mean this leads to good things. If the source owner has a polite request, honoring that is usually the best course of action, independent of what the law says. (Ask people who thought image hotlinking was OK even against requests, and how goatse looked on their page)
"It's legal" doesn't mean that it's decent behavior.
Re: “Please don't add any of my stuff to this project”
#19Can someone elucidate why he is so against "his" code being used in this project?
> If users experiencing issues with the ambee library in this package, they will knock on my door. And I'm not willing to support that or accept that burden. Especially as I don't see a good repacking reason in this case.
Users will contact the author for support, but users are getting the software indirectly via a packager, which means a) there might be changes from the packager b) they might be getting an older version that appears to be the "latest" and c) they don't have a way to install a modified version provided by the author to test out a fix in the same way that they installed their current version.
(It's true that with nixpkgs these problems are much more solvable than in basically any other distro, but the risk is stil there.)
Re: “Please don't add any of my stuff to this project”
#20I am reminded of jwz, debian, and xscreensaver (Not linking to jwz's blog from HN because... he doesn't want it to be.)
That cracks me up every time