Comment by andrewmcwatters
5 years ago
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 write FOSS. They provide it as-is. Take it or leave it. No one is obligated to take support harassment.
The arguments left on GitHub are "well you chose this license" and generally, sure that's done out of good faith, but when organizations test the boundaries of an author's intent, they have no option but to relicense or dual-license.
And you know what, this isn't even unique! Tons of FOSS projects do not support alternative distributions. In fact, implicitly, virtually no one does. Most authors publish software with the expectation you'll use their distribution channels.
> 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?
> You're entitled to nothing when authors write FOSS. They provide it as-is. Take it or leave it. No one is obligated to take support harassment.
the author of the lib literally pushed it to Home Assistant, so he gave it to a relatively famous project that is present in a lot of distro and Snapstore. Pushing to such project is a guarantee that your code will be repackaged. He could say it was a misunderstanding and require to be remove from HA, but to go to a project that uses the project that you PR your code into? eh. We have licensing for this reason and I am quite sure if frenck had choose the correct license/limitation from the beginning, it would have never been accepted into HA and this whole problem would have been avoided
> Tons of FOSS projects do not support alternative distributions. In fact, implicitly, virtually no one does. Most authors publish software with the expectation you'll use their distribution channels.
I don't think this is true, and the fact that already author's libs had been already packaged in Gentoo, Fedora and possibly more distro (and he said he will request to remove them) show how quickly alternative and well used channel can and will pick them up if not specified in your license. Especially if the project you are contributing is ALREADY packaged in different disto.
source: https://github.com/home-assistant/core/pull/51645
Does that change what you're entitled to? No.
The way an author expresses and codifies their "wishes" over redistribution is through a license. If the current license does not accurately reflect the author's "wishes", it should be amended. Otherwise it is bogus to declare that this software is under the MIT license.
Having the author's wishes expressed in law ensures that all users can receive equal, non-discriminatory and predictable treatment, rather than having to walk on eggshells around what an author may or may not like you doing.
The authors intent seems to be "don't use rights i have explicitly granted you and which you explicitly have from pypi"
Which is something of a bait and switch for a MIT licenced library