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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”

#81

Post by pugworthy »

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…

> It seems like the reason is (paraphrasing) "because I can't meet the resulting burden of support."

Exactly. He made that point a few times, but the replies don't always seem to address the issue he raises.

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

#82

Post by Zancarius »

stavros wrote: post #61
reidjs wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#84

Post by danuker »

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 lost the blog post I learned this from, but one way to do it is whenever someone opens a PR on a project you don't want to maintain anymore, make them a maintainer!

That way, the project lives on with minimal disruption to its users.

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

#85

Post by mirthflat83 »

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…

Just because you are legally allowed to do so doesn’t mean that you should. Hopefully you have a similar stance towards Amazon’s behavior in the OSS community.

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

#86

Post by jchw »

TheChaplain wrote: post #44
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…

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."

It's being added as a dependency to home assistant, a popular package, so they are pretty much between a rock and a hard place. Ultimately, if the author of the code doesn't want it redistributed by distributions, I assume home assistant will have to remove it from upstream. It might be good for someone to raise the flag with home assistant since this is apparently becoming a point of contention with two different distros now.

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

#88

Post by swiley »

steveklabnik wrote: post #17
arthurcolle wrote: post #11

Can someone elucidate why he is so against "his" code being used in this project?

He says early in the thread: > 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.

So ye olde "I don't like distros packaging my FOSS project because they won't do it exactly the way I want."

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

#89

Post by deif »

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 page HN where I will most certainly be avoiding using any project the author is part of.

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

#90

Post by res0nat0r »

63 wrote: post #21

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.

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.
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