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

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

#181

Post by pas »

alexaholic wrote: post #167

This looks like an attempt to ridicule the guy. He’s made a simple request and he doesn’t have to explain himself. The other parties can comply or not, they may ask questions or not, but surely publishing this non-story to HN and have people interpret his actions, fantasize about his understanding of OSS, their social skills etc, and eventually deride him is a bit hostile and immature. Folks, he’s a human being. He’s…

Like his request, the submitter can simply submit this to HN for us to simply look at it and, like the author, we can simply share our thoughts, and everyone is free to think and feel whatever they do. We are human too, social animals and all that.

Are HN readers/commenters known for harassment? How alone are folks supposed to leave him?

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

#182

Post by aequitas »

sleepydog wrote: post #96

I fail to see why the author could not add instructions to their project's issue tracker, something to the effect of "If you want to report a bug, please reproduce the issue with the latest pypi package. Reports for any other deployment methods will be closed without further discussion."

A lot of people don't RTFM.

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

#183

Post by Denvercoder9 »

noahtallen wrote: post #163
whateveracct wrote: post #150

What's worse is this frenk guy seems to be the reason his packages are being added to nixpkgs He added the dependency himself https://github.com/home-assistant/core/pull/51645 Nobody gives a shit about frenk or his code directly here - they want to use Home Assistant. But now that frenk added his code as a dependency, he has the right to transitively make Home Assistant un-packagable on NixOS? EDIT: On top of that, t…

I’m no expert, but I’m fairly sure that Frenk’s license has to be compatible with home assistance’s license for it to be included. If home assistance has a normal OSS license, I doubt it can use a dependency with a very restrictive license. (Such as one with a list of what can use it!) In other words, I don’t think it’s possible form him to transitively make home assistant’s license more restrictive.

Home Assistant itself uses the Apache 2.0 license, which is pretty permissive. It doesn't impose much requirements on derivative works, so it can use a dependency with a restrictive license without problem.

However, this would become problematic if Home Assistant also uses a GPL dependency (which it probably does). That dependency would impose a requirement that all other libraries used by Home Assistant use a GPL-compatible license (which his license likely wouldn't be).

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

#184

Post by whateveracct »

cmm wrote: post #119

regardless 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

Nothing wrong with patching

Part of the beauty of Nix is it's easy to maintain patches - this can be nice cost-wise compared to upstreaming in many cases.

Not saying upstreaming isn't a generally good thing, but it's nice to have this other option.

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

#186

Post by SuperSandro2000 »

aequitas wrote: post #174
Denvercoder9 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bee…

> 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.. The person proposing the Nix package is a Home assistant developer afaik, so that would be weird.

Yes, fabaff is a bigger home-assistant contributor to my knowledge and started to help out packaging a lot of the missing python libraries for NixOS.

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

#187

Post by tw04 »

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…

I guess I've always struggled with this, because this seems like an extremely easy problem to solve.

In this particular instance, if you think the problem is "nix users are overwhelming me" - then you have a hard and fast requirement of: if you want support fill out this form that includes OS version. If someone lists NixOS as their version you give a canned response linking them back to the Nix github page.

If the issue is just a generic: my package is so huge there is just an unending list of people asking for help. Ignore them? I get as a maintainer you may have a desire to help folks, but nobody is forcing you to. Browse github and respond to the things you feel like responding to, and ignore the rest.

I mean this with all due respect, but part of being an adult is knowing when and how to say no.

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

#188

Post by Spivak »

jamincan wrote: post #178
robotresearcher wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

He later says he will relicense it so only specific projects can use his code. I think that would likely invalidate their own licenses, so I'm not sure how that would work.

Not retroactively. They can stay on the old version forever / maintain the new fork but any new code will be under the new license.

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

#189

Post by Spivak »

lucideer wrote: post #120
TheChaplain wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cha…

They appear to have done that last bit after getting nowhere with the Nix maintainers. Does that prove their seriousness?

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

#190

Post by mpfundstein »

Spivak wrote: post #179
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…

I think there’s some emotional nuance here. After a certain point he basically said all of his technical justification and the request does boil down to “because I said so and I’m the author.” The Nix maintainers explicitly do not want to respect the author’s wishes (which is fine) but that makes the whole thing turn adversarial because “okay we won’t include it” wasn’t even something the maintainers considered for e…

they have good reason to not not include it.
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