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.
“Please don't add any of my stuff to this project”
21–30 of 363 posts
Re: “Please don't add any of my stuff to this project”
#22Seems 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…
Reading through all the comments that was my take as well.
Re: “Please don't add any of my stuff to this project”
#23that frenck guy actually just comes off as an a-hole. especially with their passive aggressive responses. why are so many software people like this? maybe he should change his license
Re: “Please don't add any of my stuff to this project”
#24Can someone elucidate why he is so against "his" code being used in this project?
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Re: “Please don't add any of my stuff to this project”
#25Really 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 don’t think its as simple as respect the authors wishes. You are participating in a large OS ecosystem as soon as you become a dependency of another project. Most people don’t care about the package in this case and just want the package that is using it.
The author is additionally being intentionally dense and inflammatory. They are unlikely to get their way acting like this instead of trying to find a compromise as others are trying to do.
Re: “Please don't add any of my stuff to this project”
#26Really 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…
> so there’s some obligation for them to respect that.
There is ZERO obligation for an OSS author. Nothing, zilch. It is NICE to respect requests or help with issues you don't care about, but clearly not required when you are working on something FOR FREE.
Re: “Please don't add any of my stuff to this project”
#27Can 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.
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/126326#issuecomment-86...
Re: “Please don't add any of my stuff to this project”
#28Really 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.
The license can only be revoked ex nunc presumably?
Do you have a reference or, more preferably, casserole to share on this point?
Re: “Please don't add any of my stuff to this project”
#29Earlier 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.
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/commun…
What you are proposing doesn’t work with nix packaging
Re: “Please don't add any of my stuff to this project”
#30Can someone elucidate why he is so against "his" code being used in this project?
I don't have any experience of nix packaging, but I work on a couple of programs when Debian applied some broken patches while packaging, then "we" (upstream) get the bug reports. It's annoying as we don't have any way of fixing it, just have to tell users to uninstall the Debian version.