Comment by TheChaplain
5 years ago
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."
5 years ago
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."
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 changing the license to make it closed source.
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)
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.
It appear this has already been done, and the founder of home assistant seems to be supporting the developer. [0]
I'm starting to get the feeling that home automation might be somewhat hostile to repackaging.
[0] https://community.home-assistant.io/t/consider-to-avoid-addi...
This is unfortunate, but I suppose it joins the growing list of open source things that I have to avoid because I don't want to support behavior that's hostile/antithetical to the health of the open source ecosystem. It's a damn shame, but nothing new.
What you're describing would be to comply with what are effectively shadow terms in an apparent open source license, which is not something that should be tolerated as it makes a farce of the whole purpose of licenses.