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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”

#271

Post by ticviking »

The more I observe this situation the more I'm fascinated by the dynamic of his releasing an internal dependency to homekit as a "public library" leaning on the public infrastructure provided by python to distribute a dependency that he's actively hostile to anyone else using.

IANAL but it seems to me that even if he switches to some custom no redistribution/repackageing license unless he stops using pypi's infrastructure he's granting all pypi users the right to publish the code independently. By uploading it to pypi he's explicitly given all users of pypi the right to publish it[1].

[1] - https://pypi.org/policy/terms-of-use/

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

#272

Post by lucideer »

reidjs wrote: post #9
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.

One of the comments: "As the author of the package that is being re-packaged here. I'm against it being repacked into here. While licensing wise I cannot stop you, I do hope you can honor my request. Thank you for considering respecting the author's wishes." It seems more like a matter of respect than a matter of law.

If you follow the thread all the way down (and elsewhere, e.g. HA & Fedora communities), you'll see that the author does not seem to truly hold to his own statement that he "cannot stop [them]", and proceeds to attempt to bully them into compliance (despite many efforts by them to come to a compromise that may suit him)

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

#273

Post by somethingor »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #246

Both the comments on GitHub, and this thread are an absolutely awful look for open source, and it's feedback like this that drives excellent creators to stop creating open source projects, leaving the entire FOSS ecosystem left with half-assed solutions or hand-off maintainers who can do nothing more than nominal bugfixes once an original author leaves because of harassment. You're entitled to nothing when authors wr…

> You're entitled to nothing when authors write FOSS. They provide it as-is. Take it or leave it.

In this case it seems NixOS is just trying to exercise the “take it” option, but the author only wants to offer them the “leave it” one. If it’s actually “take it or leave it,” what’s the issue?

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

#274

Post by mijoharas »

It seems that the author has posted again on the github issue after it got unlocked [0].

They do finally go into a little more detail about what their issues are with the packaging, beyond the single post with details originally in the thread.

> In the end, I think the way this project distributes Home Assistant (and its integrations, including Ambee) is not providing the intended working and thus may surprise the end user. In the end, those users are likely to knock on the doors of the Home Assistant project and their integration maintainers, not this project. As a matter of fact, most of my packages in this project are outdated and don't match the distributed version of Home Assistant.

They don't seem to address why they don't think that any of the proposed solutions would have addressed their concerns.

[0] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/126326#issuecomment-86...

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

#275

Post by sangnoir »

lucideer wrote: post #196
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...

Wow, that thread is wild. If the views in that discussion are generally representative of the perspective of a majority of homeassistant maintainers & stewards, I'd be extremely wary of relying on the software long term. > Just do as he asks This is the absolute antithesis of the intent of open source. What an awful community response.

> This is the absolute antithesis of the intent of open source.

I disagree with this assertion (...and with Frenck too). There was no need for NixOS packagers to involve HA here, they are outsourcing work upstream. Imagine some small-time driver author/maintainer asking Debian to remove their driver - and Debian's solution to honor this request is to ask Linus to drop the driver from his upstream tree!

The long-held tradition, when you disagree with upstream, is to maintain your own patch-set that you are responsible for and have to labor to keep current - that is not the antithesis of open source - it is very much in the spirit of exercising the right to change the source code as you see fit.

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

#276

Post by jsmith45 »

fmajid wrote: post #201
tardyp wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python ambee is a simple client library for a proprietary sass iot service. I guess they want to control exactly how their users are using their service.

Yet the author is an admin on the HomeAssistant community forum, one of only 6. Presumably his other contributions to the project justify those privileges, and he did not shut down the passive-aggressive thread some nixOs folks started there, it was another admin (the founder of HomeAssistant). This sucks for nixOs, but it looks like community incompatibility means they won’t be able to support HomeAssistant at all.

Some context: Frenck is a core developer on the Home Assistant project, and was hired by Nabu Casa (the company the project's founder founded to try to create a sustainable funding source via adding some optional value-add services) to develop for Home Assistant full time.

If instead of packing these separately, the home assistant nixpkg for home assistant simply downloaded all the required dependencies from PyPi, and verified them against a maintained list of checksums as part of the nixpkg (for reproducibility), then frenck probably would not object to that, since the last I knew the some of the official home assistant docker images do preinstall the requirements for the majority of plugins like that.

I'm suspect frenck's real concern comes from any possibility of modifications in the packaged version, combined with any possibility of nix allowing home assistant to be used with a version that is not an exact match of what home assistant specifies.

Alternatively If this could be packages as some form of home-assistant sub-package that was guaranteed to always match the PyPi version specified for home assistant exactly, without any mixing and matching, it would likely allay his concerns. Unfortunately he has not spelled out his concerns fully, so I cannot know for sure. I also have no idea if this is at all feasible in the nix packaging system.

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

#277

Post by aequitas »

lesto wrote: post #260
esens wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is incredibly legitimate reason. Could these repacking be replaced with some type of just proxy/clone that is still the original source?

the author of the lib pushed the code by a PR to Home Assistant, a project that is packaged by multiple distribution, including ubuntu, fedora, arch and more, all of which will repackage the library. The author should ask for removal from HA, not going to all packager for all distro requiring to be removed

The author is a core contributor of HA, so he will have a strong opinion about removing his own package I think.

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

#278

Post by Dylan16807 »

sangnoir wrote: post #275
lucideer wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that thread is wild. If the views in that discussion are generally representative of the perspective of a majority of homeassistant maintainers & stewards, I'd be extremely wary of relying on the software long term. > Just do as he asks This is the absolute antithesis of the intent of open source. What an awful community response.

> This is the absolute antithesis of the intent of open source. I disagree with this assertion (...and with Frenck too). There was no need for NixOS packagers to involve HA here, they are outsourcing work upstream. Imagine some small-time driver author/maintainer asking Debian to remove their driver - and Debian's solution to honor this request is to ask Linus to drop the driver from his upstream tree! The long-held…

> Imagine some small-time driver author/maintainer asking Debian to remove their driver - and Debian's solution to honor this request is to ask Linus to drop the driver from his upstream tree!

If their reason is "we don't want our driver distributed from someone else's git repo" then it would be a very good idea to warn Linus about it!

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

#279

Post by noobermin »

soraminazuki wrote: post #194
dwelch wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. This is kind of bizarre behavior from someone who is such an important contributor to Home Assistant, a large scale open source platform. I can’t imagine most of the leaders in Home Assistant would share this attitude, but maybe I’m wrong.

Unfortunately, the founder of Home Assistant has acted similarly too. When NixOS maintainers raised concerns, he accused them of having "no intention to contribute anything positively." This was despite NixOS maintainers' best efforts to engage in a civil discussion. To make matters worse, he even used the fact that the NixOS discussion was temporarily locked down due to high tensions and accused NixOS maintainers of…

This and the OP seem to suggest there is something else going on behind the scenes than just abrasive personalities. Do the people who work on Home Assistant have some issue with NixOS?

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

#280

Post by gigel82 »

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...

Are you sure that's NixOS? Perhaps the issue is that NixOS doesn't have an official spokesperson?

I'm sure someone like that would do a little more diligence before blasting on the home-assistant community forums about one of their moderators (and apparently the 4th largest code contributor to the ha project overall).

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