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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”

#91

This is an extremely odd request for something licensed as MIT. Especially since the code layer is so thin. The project has existed for a week, and consists of 360 lines of python, most of which are get/set on what I think is JSON. Edit: Geez. Half the commits are bumping dependencies. The project is incredibly clean and beautifully structured, but gosh...

Totally worth the effort to re-implement/find an alternative when the code in question is so minimal. No need to deal with this guy.

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

#92
post #18
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.

As the author says, that can be fixed with a relicensing. Just because you're legally entitled to be a pain doesn't mean this leads to good things. If the source owner has a polite request, honoring that is usually the best course of action, independent of what the law says. (Ask people who thought image hotlinking was OK even against requests, and how goatse looked on their page) "It's legal" doesn't mean that it's…

> As the author says, that can be fixed with a relicensing.

But he cannot retroactively remove MIT license. Changing license will only affect newer versions afterwards.

> If the source owner has a polite request

If this is your definition of polite so be it. I think it's quite unfriendly. Asked for a valid reason he basically says "because I want it".

If he want's them to remove it even though they have the right to use it he should at least explain why (or not publish MIT in the first place). His only argument is that he will get support requests, but he could just ignore them...

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

#93
post #50
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's just a small dependency for Home Assistant. I don't think the author will receive a lot of reports.

https://github.com/frenck/python-ambee

The project has zero issues right now. I think that is not the real reason.

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

#94
This is an interesting example of how social concerns interact with technical concerns in the real world.

We sometimes like to think that software architecture decisions are made by rational actors using logic to choose the technically best solutions, but here's an interesting example where Home Assistant may need to change its dependencies because the author of the library it relies on is too difficult to work with.

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

#95
post #84
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think that's the famous blogpost that eventually led to the event-stream malware.

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

#96
I fail to see why the author could not add instructions to their project's issue tracker, something to the effect of

"If you want to report a bug, please reproduce the issue with the latest pypi package. Reports for any other deployment methods will be closed without further discussion."

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

#97
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…

He understands it perfectly. That's why he asked nicely at first. Nixos just "request denied" him after rounds of requests and discussion. With that he's roiled up to change the license to exclude Nixos.

He just doesn't want the extra work to support another distro which would include an outdated version of his package.

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

#98
post #58
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the story here?

If you link to jwz from HN, his server notices the referer header and serves an image that mocks the HN community

Looks like if you long press on it in iOS it gets through.

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

#99
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…

[deleted]

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

#100
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…

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 insistance that everyone uses pypi and only pypi is just a tantrum not based on reality.

People could use his package from pypi and still have an outdated version. People could use a pinned version from pypi and they would always get an outdated version. People could be using an installed software from long ago and thus have an outdated version.

Thus his concerns are not magically solved by not packaging sources.

Plus, he has an attitude problem, is passive-aggressive, is closed minded and won't discuss. May he have fun with his newly weirdly licensed package,

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