God, tiny piece of code. Rewriting would take less time than arguing.
“Please don't add any of my stuff to this project”
111–120 of 363 posts
Re: “Please don't add any of my stuff to this project”
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> It seems like the reason is (paraphrasing) "because I can't meet the resulting burden of support." Exactly. He made that point a few times, but the replies don't always seem to address the issue he raises.
I think they proposed this:
> Would you be happier if we forked your upstream source to provide our own, or provided a similar Python package with an identical API that we can use as a drop-in replacement?
Wouldn’t this remove the burden of support from the author? Or it might be that I don’t understand exactly their proposal.
Re: “Please don't add any of my stuff to this project”
#113I am reminded of jwz, debian, and xscreensaver (Not linking to jwz's blog from HN because... he doesn't want it to be.)
> Not linking to jwz's blog from HN because... he doesn't want it to be I don't think ... that's how the internet works? (edit: I mean the "because... he doesn't want it to be" part)
Follow the link and enjoy
https://www.jwz.org/blog/2021/06/to-be-clear-the-whale-did-n...
edit: maybe jwz took the image down?
Re: “Please don't add any of my stuff to this project”
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
There is a considerable difference between getting requests and providing support. You don't have to provide support, but it's a little hard not to get requests.
Re: “Please don't add any of my stuff to this project”
#115Yeah, while I get the maintainer's point, the conversation rapidly devolved into giving the Nix maintainers a hard time.
I mean, c'mon, Nix is a tiny niche. It's not like the support burden will be colossal.
Re: “Please don't add any of my stuff to this project”
#116Is 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.
I think the greater context is that the Home Assistant developers are somewhat hostile to people running, and especially packaging, their software outside of their own supported methods (which are Docker containers or their own full OS). It's somewhat understandable as it creates a support burden for them, but especially given the enthusiast nature of the community this doesn't seem like a smart decision. There's been some outrage in the community about the developers deprecating platforms before.
Re: “Please don't add any of my stuff to this project”
#117I don't see anything wrong here. I think licensing terms should heavily favor authors, because if you're writing FOSS, you're already giving away intellectual property for free. You don't need to suffer any degree of support. Software in most cases is literally provided "as-is." There are no fruits to bare from providing something for free. Clout doesn't pay the bills. I think people get really weird as soon as you c…
Contrary to this, I think we do see FOSS authors post every now and then that when their packages explode in popularity, they can't provide meaningful support, and end up closing down their FOSS project instead.
I think it's entitled to want to use someone's free work against their wishes. Why is he the bad guy? He acknowledges the licence allows it, but wants to change the licence in response to people wasting his time. That's surely fair game too.
Re: “Please don't add any of my stuff to this project”
#118Really 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…
I wonder if the other Home Assistant (https://github.com/home-assistant) contributors know that their dependencies are not open source?
Re: “Please don't add any of my stuff to this project”
#119regardless of the specifics here, stuff like this is liable to pop up a lot in the coming several years while NixOS is gaining more popularity but casual (as in "not willing to put in the effort of supporting off-beat distributions") OSS authors can still reasonably ignore it. the amount of patching that Nixpkgs packagers have to do sometimes is pretty extreme
Re: “Please don't add any of my stuff to this project”
#120Seems 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…
Legally yes they are allowed and can ignore the author as they like. They can also act as a bigger person and say "Sure, we understand, respect your wish and will find an alternative."
This is a subdependency of a larger project (homeassistant) so doing so would involve nix maintaining an entirely separate fork of homeassistant, which is a completely unviable ask.
The author's conduct in that thread is certainly not what I'd call "acting as the bigger person".
If they were serious about their request they'd be looking into having the homeassistant guys removing it, or PRing to homeassistant. Or changing the license to make it closed source.