“Please don't add any of my stuff to this project” • Hacker News Board

Re: “Please don't add any of my stuff to this project”

#101

Post by kissgyorgy » Mon, Jun 14, 2021, 5:59 PM UTC

f311a wrote: post #55

kissgyorgy wrote: post #42

If you don't understand the authors frustration, read Daniel Stenberg blog about what kind of requests he gets about curl. It's insane and ridiculous, not everybody is capable of/wanting to deal with all kinds of shit and hostile users like Daniel.

That's not related to this particular issue though.

You don't understand the issue then. The author don't want to deal with all kinds of requests unrelated to his own package. NixOS is an operating system, totally understandable he doesn't want to deal with OS issues.

Re: “Please don't add any of my stuff to this project”

#102

Post by miloignis » Mon, Jun 14, 2021, 5:59 PM UTC

CJefferson wrote: post #77

elmerfud wrote: post #8

Seems like an author that doesn't understand the spirit of FOSS. The nixos team was clearly allowed to use it and include it when asking for some technical merits as to why, and even offering many alternative options to appease the author the author seemed to just childishly stamp their feet and say, "because I said so". Eventually the author took the position of "taking my ball and going home". Why is a person like…

None of the alternatives were something like "rename, so it isn't attached to them any more". I understand their issues, at present they can push new releases via pip, with this many nix users could have very out of date packages.

If I understand you, they offered that very thing in https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/126326#issuecomment-86... and it first wasn't answered, and then was dismissed with "This was already answered. Please don't repack my source in this repository was my request. I don't see how your suggestion is changing that."

That response was what confused me as to the problem with packaging the library, as it seems like that would fix the inundated-with-support-requests issue.

Re: “Please don't add any of my stuff to this project”

#103

Post by mcguire » Mon, Jun 14, 2021, 5:59 PM UTC

groby_b wrote: post #18

sneak wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

On the other hand, frenck started by saying "anyone can do X", followed by saying, "please don't do X", and then "Ok, I'll take my marbles home."

Re: “Please don't add any of my stuff to this project”

#104

Post by robotresearcher » Mon, Jun 14, 2021, 5:59 PM UTC

nailer wrote: post #43

elmerfud wrote: post #8

Seems like an author that doesn't understand the spirit of FOSS. The nixos team was clearly allowed to use it and include it when asking for some technical merits as to why, and even offering many alternative options to appease the author the author seemed to just childishly stamp their feet and say, "because I said so". Eventually the author took the position of "taking my ball and going home". Why is a person like…

He doesn’t understand the letter of OSS either. Limiting who can distribute a project means it no longer meets the Open Source Definition and is therefore not OSS.

No, he acknowledges explicitly early in the thread that the license allows the code to be redistributed with or without his approval.

Re: “Please don't add any of my stuff to this project”

#105

Post by andruc » Mon, Jun 14, 2021, 5:59 PM UTC

mcguire wrote: post #63

kissgyorgy wrote: post #42

If you don't understand the authors frustration, read Daniel Stenberg blog about what kind of requests he gets about curl. It's insane and ridiculous, not everybody is capable of/wanting to deal with all kinds of shit and hostile users like Daniel.

So...don't publish software? That's part of the game, no?

No! You are not obligated to receive support for software just because it was written by someone else.

Re: “Please don't add any of my stuff to this project”

#106

Post by Macha » Mon, Jun 14, 2021, 6:00 PM UTC

63 wrote: post #21

Is there greater context here that helps explain what's going on? Reading the comments in the thread didn't clarify much for me as someone unfamiliar with NixOS, their apparently unique Python packaging scheme, and Home Assistant.

It sounds like Home Assistant by default pulls the (EDIT: Home assistant specified, not latest) version of the package from PyPI at runtime and loads it dynamically.

The point of NixOS is reproducible builds, that is if you build a given nix environment you will always get the same code. Dynamically pulling from PyPI at runtime defeats that.

The author doesn't want any way of downloading the code other than getting "the supported version" from PyPI, as they don't want to deal with support requests for issues that are fixed later. They are likely worried that packaged versions will become stale, and users will expect support for specific versions, which they are unprepared to offer.

I think the offers from NixOS of having to enable config flags to get this enabled which make it clear it's not supported by upstream should be fair. Part of open source is that others are free to modify your code, and if you have a problem with that you're not really ok with the idea of open source.

Re: “Please don't add any of my stuff to this project”

#107

Post by kissgyorgy » Mon, Jun 14, 2021, 6:01 PM UTC

mcguire wrote: post #63

kissgyorgy wrote: post #42

If you don't understand the authors frustration, read Daniel Stenberg blog about what kind of requests he gets about curl. It's insane and ridiculous, not everybody is capable of/wanting to deal with all kinds of shit and hostile users like Daniel.

So...don't publish software? That's part of the game, no?

Maybe it comes with it, but I think you have no obligation to deal with it if you don't want to.

Re: “Please don't add any of my stuff to this project”

#108

Post by aequitas » Mon, Jun 14, 2021, 6:01 PM UTC

eganist wrote: post #50

elmerfud wrote: post #8

Seems like an author that doesn't understand the spirit of FOSS. The nixos team was clearly allowed to use it and include it when asking for some technical merits as to why, and even offering many alternative options to appease the author the author seemed to just childishly stamp their feet and say, "because I said so". Eventually the author took the position of "taking my ball and going home". Why is a person like…

It seems like the reason is (paraphrasing) "because I can't meet the resulting burden of support." which is something I haven't really seen anything in the open source world manage, though that might be because I'm not much of a contributor. What happens if a utility explodes in usage and the author can no longer effectively support it as a result of being buried in overhead? Are there any mechanisms for limiting how…

> Are there any mechanisms for limiting how much of one's life an author signs away to their project (without feeling compelled to grow an operation) while still retaining an Open Source designation?

You don't have to do anything to keep it open source. The source is already open, others can use it, fork it, etc. There is no formal obligation for you as maintainer. However as a maintainer you can feel a moral obligation for whatever reason (pride, guilt, peer pressure, etc).

Re: “Please don't add any of my stuff to this project”

#109

Post by mcguire » Mon, Jun 14, 2021, 6:01 PM UTC

bitwize wrote: post #7

pfraze wrote: post #2

Really 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.

Do you have case law for that?

Re: “Please don't add any of my stuff to this project”

#110

Post by munk-a » Mon, Jun 14, 2021, 6:01 PM UTC

Latty wrote: post #51

elmerfud wrote: post #8

Seems like an author that doesn't understand the spirit of FOSS. The nixos team was clearly allowed to use it and include it when asking for some technical merits as to why, and even offering many alternative options to appease the author the author seemed to just childishly stamp their feet and say, "because I said so". Eventually the author took the position of "taking my ball and going home". Why is a person like…

When they offered to fork it completely to avoid the issue and he rejected that, it really just looks bad. I get being done with something when you've had a bad experience, but the maintainers here went to every effort to accommodate, and did so in a friendly way. It reads like this guy wanted a fight and an excuse. I think the correct answer is to just make the fork as proposed and use that instead, it solves the pr…

From what I can see in the thread (and I'm not very familiar with the tech so I'm working off of inference here) it looks like the library fetching tool is well equipped to fetch the freshest branch from his repository directly. His responses are very minimal but it sounds like he's objecting to older versions of his library being bundled in and causing breakages on the client side - forking would potentially just make this problem worse from his point of view if his primary concern is the fact that users get out of date code - compared to the concern of code maintenance.

Daniel Stenberg creator of cURL has famously gotten a lot of weird support requests and emails over the years due to his license being shipped with an insane number of different utilities. He has handled them gracefully and with good humor from what I've seen, but not everyone is comfortable with fielding questions from random non-technical users - if that's where this dev is coming from then forking the project would probably let him dodge a lot of the responsibility. I just can't clearly tell due to how terse[1] his replies are.

1. I would say succinct here due to the fact that it lacks the negative connotations of terse, but it also implies a completeness of information which sadly isn't here. Please don't read terse as insulting or negative in any way.