Comment by forkerenok

2 months ago

What's the drama around starlette? (Can't find anything)

https://github.com/Kludex/starlette/issues/3180 and before that https://github.com/Kludex/starlette/issues/3042

  • I think that may be the first time I've seen licensing drama over something as minor as adding another author to the copyright list.

    Pretty sure those are completely standard for major changes in maintainers/hostile forks/acknowledging major contributors. I've seen a lot of abandoned MIT/BSD projects add a new line for forks/maintainers being active again in order to acknowledge that the project is currently being headed by someone else.

    From my "I am not a lawyer" view, Kludex is basically correct, although I suppose to do it "properly", he might need to just duplicate the license text in order to make it clear both contributors licensed under BSD 3-clause. Probably unnecessary though, given it's not a license switch (you see that style more for ie. switching from MIT to BSD or from MIT/BSD to GPL, since that's a more substantial change); the intent of the license remains the same regardless and it's hard to imagine anyone would get confused.

    I suspect (given the hammering on it in responses), that Kludex asking ChatGPT if it was correct is what actually pissed off the original developer, rather than the addition of Kludex to the list in and of itself.

    • (Not a lawyer either but—)

      The original author said they were “the license holder”, specifically with a “the”, in discussions around both Starlette and MkDocs, which yes, just isn’t true even after rounding the phrase to the nearest meaningful, “the copyright holder”. This appears to be an honest misconception of theirs, so, not the end of the world, except they seem to be failing at communication hard enough to not realize they might be wrong to begin with.

      Note though that with respect to Starlette this ended up being essentially a (successful and by all appearances not intentionally hostile?) project takeover, so the emotional weight of the drama should be measured with respect to that, not just an additional copyright line.

  • lovelydinosaur appears to be undergoing a mental health crisis. Besides the drama and lies, I notice they (I think they?) seemed to misname the maintainer on purpose. They did it in the first thread, which the maintainer tried to correct, and they misnamed him again in the second thread.

    Mia Kimberly Christie seems like dangerous person.

    • This has been ongoing for some time. I’ve raised valid issues in several encode projects and received rude/dismissive comments from this individual. I’ve reviewed their recent interactions with others on GitHub and it’s obvious that Mia (tom?) is super toxic/drama seeking

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