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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”

#211

Post by Denvercoder9 »

simonw wrote: post #191

It looks like the bigger question here is this: Is it the official policy of the home-assistant project that their software should not be packaged by NixOS? frenck is the fourth most active contributor to home-assistant - and it uses quite a few libraries he has authored: https://github.com/home-assistant/core/graphs/contributors If frenck is saying NixOS can't package his libraries, he's actually enforcing that NixO…

> Is it the official policy of the home-assistant project that their software should not be packaged by NixOS?

I have the impression that it is the policy of the home-assistant project that their software should not be run in any way not supported by them, and not redistributed by any distribution or other third party. They're somewhat actively hostile against people not following that.

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

#212

Post by aequitas »

bogota wrote: post #25
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…

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…

> You are participating in a large OS ecosystem as soon as you become a dependency of another project.

It also seems the author wrote this library specifically to be included in Home assistant (since HA only allows glue code to be included in the core and keep the implementation specific parts in dependencies) and does a lot of HA development. So he knew what he was getting into. It's not like he's library was added by someone else and he will now be overwhelmed by all the additional NixOS users. His requests to not repackage his code because of the support burden seems a little moot to me.

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

#213

Post by Denvercoder9 »

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.

Well, Home Assistant is a large project with lots of contributors, so it's not surprising that its developers don't have a singular opinion. However, this is the impression I get from the official announcements and other interactions I've seen on GitHub.

Another incident was when they deprecated/unsupported installing it on a generic Linux install last year, which they had to (somewhat) back down from after community outrage.

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

#214

Post by totony »

throwaaskjdfh wrote: post #34
INTPenis wrote: post #4

I've seen a similar situation when Ansible were resolving issues with Jinja2 but Ansible contributors simply helped the Jinja contributors to resolve the issue. It wasn't like all the burden was put on the jinja project. Now those are two very active projects but what I mean is that no one is forcing the author of the repackaged code to support anyone he does not have time to support. If they want support they can as…

It still takes effort to sort support requests into those he wants to handle and those he doesn't. If he thinks that the manner in which is work is being used is going to bury him with requests, whether he takes them or not, it makes sense to try to avoid the situation altogether. I don't think there's a way to actually do that with an open source project though.

You could put a disclaimer like people on the issue suggested. Nix users are pretty advanced anyway so I doubt he'd get that many useless bug reports.

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

#215

Post by res0nat0r »

lucideer wrote: post #161
res0nat0r wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He just doesn't want anything of his included in nixpkgs because he doesn't want to deal with anyone opening Github issues against his repos if there happen to be build / installation issues that are coming from some kind of failure in the nixpkgs install / build process.

That's speculative on his part (noone has opened any issues with him, neither coming from nixos nor from any other repackaging). The nixos guys also offered various proposals to him to completely avoid any support burden on his part, all of which he roundly rejected. Seems he's just being unreasonable for the sake of it tbh; I can't see any logical reasoning behind it all.

Not sure why I'm being downvoted for what he explicitly lays out from the link above:

    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.
> Seems he's just being unreasonable for the sake of it tbh; I can't see any logical reasoning behind it all.

I agree.

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

#216

Post by fmajid »

Zancarius wrote: post #82
stavros wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Nix maintainers asked very nicely whether there was a specific reason and whether they could work with the author to solved it. The author just said "no, just don't include my stuff", which he technically didn't have the right to say after releasing the code as FOSS. You can't demand respect from the Nix folks after disrespecting them by telling them to do something "just because".

Honestly, I think the best solution in this case is to fork his repo from a version still under the MIT license and work with home-automation to replace their dependency.

He is a HomeAssistant community admin and they took his side, this is a case of two FOSS communities with irreconcilable differences.

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

#217

Post by richardfey »

FemmeAndroid wrote: post #159

Here's the thread NixOS posted to the Home Assistant forums, "Consider to avoid adding library dependencies from frenck." https://community.home-assistant.io/t/consider-to-avoid-addi...

Which was closed by the moderator..I tend to side with the author here.

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

#218

Post by lucideer »

Spivak wrote: post #189
lucideer wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Which last bit?

From looking at the ambee repo the license appears to still be MIT; can't see any relicensing anywhere.

(And actually, as has been mentioned elsewhere, it seems like it wouldn't be possible for him to relicense in reality as the package is explicitly developed for homeassistant and as such would need to comply with homeassistant's licensing to be included as a dependency of it)

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

#219

Post by res0nat0r »

Isthatablackgsd wrote: post #131
res0nat0r wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He just doesn't want anything of his included in nixpkgs because he doesn't want to deal with anyone opening Github issues against his repos if there happen to be build / installation issues that are coming from some kind of failure in the nixpkgs install / build process.

Also they offered various options to appease the author including code forking and the author rejected them all. Basically the team exhausted all of their options to make this author happy but the author seem not to understand the reality of FOSS. This author shouldn't be in the FOSS if the author is going to roadblock every options despite his licensing explicitly allows including the codes.

Agreed. If he wants to be stubborn like this he just should change his licensing so it can't be included anywhere else upstream and that would put an end to it.

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

#220

Post by totony »

andruc wrote: post #105
mcguire wrote: post #63

Earlier 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.

To be fair, the reason the curl author is being contacted is because (IIRC) he advertises his name and ways to contact him in curl. The point of advertising yourself is to get people to contact you, and you can't control who does (but can ignore them).
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