Live data from Hacker News

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

github.com

341–350 of 363 posts

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

#341
post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He strikes me as someone who has been burnt by the packaging issues that have been around in the ecosystem for years. You're right that the existence of PyPI doesn't mean everyone is forced to link back to it, but damn it would make a lot of stuff a hell of a lot easier if it did. I've been bitten by Debian packages being years out of date, I've seen packages modified by maintainers in ways that are poorly documented…

> I've been bitten by Debian packages being years out of date I've been bitten far harder by pypi packages trying to download random opaque binaries, miscompiling their own binaries, vendoring and failing to update large packages, having impossible-to-satisfy dependency requirements (relying on pip only ever making a half-assed attempt at satisfying them) and generally making strange assumptions about the target syst…

That is indeed also a problem! Essentially it comes down to wrapping sets of dependency management. Thankfully the "engineering" side of Python is fairly good at this in my experience, but I have seen the "data science" side of Python do some of this.

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

#342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO, it's worse than that: frenk does seem to understand the history of FOSS distribution. Most Linux distributions included packaged sources for the software. This is no different. They did not point back to the original repo, not to the source control repo. They had rmps or the equivalent. The existence of pypi does not mean everyone is forced to link back to it and use it has their own source repo. Frenk insistanc…

He strikes me as someone who has been burnt by the packaging issues that have been around in the ecosystem for years. You're right that the existence of PyPI doesn't mean everyone is forced to link back to it, but damn it would make a lot of stuff a hell of a lot easier if it did. I've been bitten by Debian packages being years out of date, I've seen packages modified by maintainers in ways that are poorly documented…

The whole point of nix is to decrease the chances of being burnt by dependency management. This is why packages don't rely on _just installing packages via pip_.

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

#343
post #299
post #89

I find it quite amusing that the package author refuses to act reasonably and states he wishes to spend no time on the project, whilst being pulled further into the project. If he simply willingly engaged with the project owners to resolve the situation he could avoided: 1. Spending so much time trying to get the project to stop what they were doing. 2. Peacefully come to a mutually beneficial arrangement. 3. Front p…

This attitude has done a lot of reputational damage to Home Assistant which is unfortunate.

I am considering moving over to alternative already. I don't want to be dependent on a project that actively dissuades people packaging it up.

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

#344
post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> That's speculative on his part (noone has opened any issues with him, neither coming from nixos nor from any other repackaging). Which is the whole point of acting on it before it happens... It's crazy the amount of entitlement I see toward open-source developers. You don't like his stance, then fork it and support it yourself. You are already lucky to have a good base to work on, you shouldn't even be entitled to…

They explicitly offered to do that, and also suggested 3 other solutions to address his concern, and he shot all suggestions down with what amounted to "I already told you what I want: Don't repackage my code."

The only entitlement form the nixos devs has been using a right which Frenck explicitly chose to provide when licensing his software.

In the end, the will have to fork it, and probably maintain a fork of HM, since he is relicensing it to disallow repackaging.

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

#346
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Revoked in the way of changing the license for future releases, he can't retroactively remove the MIT license from previous releases. Revocation isn't the ideal way to frame this.

Yes, he can, because of the way contract law works.

In order for a contract to be valid, and enforceable on both sides, there has to be an offer, acceptance, and consideration. No consideration (payment), no contract, and the open source license reverts to what is known in law as a bare license. Bare licenses can be revoked at any time, at will, by the licensor, regardless of any promises made by the licensor to respect the license in perpetuity. (You can always tell a squatter to leave your property, regardless of how permissive you've been in the past.) This includes revoking the license to software downloaded under an open source license for which the licensee has given no consideration.

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

#347

I searched their forums and the issues on their core repo on Github, and cumulatively there are 20 issues that contain NixOS, of which some are created by NixOS maintainers themselves.

I was interested and also searched, here are the results:

https://github.com/home-assistant/core/issues?q=is%3Aissue+n...

https://community.home-assistant.io/search?q=nixos

I sampled a few of the closed issues and it cemented my decision to not use Home-Assistant for my Zigbee setup at home because of the recent behavior of frenck and other Home-Assistant top tier persons.

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

#348
post #5
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.

The author’s contractual wishes are specified there. It’s fine for an author to have additional, non-contractual wishes. (Legally, it’s equally fine for someone to follow or not follow those additional wishes.)

To be fair, you should not have used "legally" in the sentence above. So there's the license, there's the author's wish, and there's the other party's wish, and both wishes are equally valid, they don't have to agree at all, what matters is the license.

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

#349

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…

I agree that situations like this are scary, because they can lead to mob mentality. I wonder why you're downvoted for this.

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

#350
post #181

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?

I have no answer for your last question, and I don't think there's a well defined line. Maybe the line is that we shouldn't share comment drama. The reality is that these kinds of discussions can lead to bullying, and that's what's not so simple about just discussing issues like this.
Post reply on HN