No need for popcorn. I just want to have something instructive to point people to in the future rather than risk offending anyone by telling them "no" directly (which, in my experience, many people take well, but those who don't take it well *really *don't take it well*).*
I'd also like to call attention to the fact that nobody ever seems to read the strange incantation under the image of the Holy Beast of the Resplendent Horns: *This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUTANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or * *FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.* Resulting in the delusion that the free software author is somehow obligated to spend the rest of his remaining days on Earth implementing out-of-scope features demanded by imposing strangers, rather than caring for himself and his (real, in-scope, i.e. local) community. Regarding contributions: when the young man walks past the house and sees the roof he helped to fix, his heart is warmed and he knows "I did a good thing." When the old man looks at the house he built, including the roof that was once sturdy, then becoming leaky, and then being repaired by the young man, and thinks of all the weary travellers he has sheltered, he knows "I did a good thing." The young man doesn't think he owns the house, and neither does he think he's owed anything (for he fixed the roof to repay the old man's kindness in letting him sleep there for free one bitter winter's night). This is the net positivity that comes from real community effort (rather than the kind of Communities led by Dictators). But the point is, someone must ultimately be responsible for the house. You're all familiar with the tragedy of the commons, I'm sure. If you let any random person barge in and dictate what happens, you'll have a pile of rafters rather than a house in very short order. On Mon, Jan 4, 2021 at 7:39 PM Aaron Duerksen <[email protected]> wrote: > Seriously, this is just...wow. Both entertaining and saddening at the > same time. And I don't think there's an innocent party at all, at least > not anymore. > > > > As rewarding as it might be, and as proud as it might make you to point > to something in an official repo and say, "I wrote that!", as an honest > singular, I don't think that's possible. Others *will* contribute to > it, put their features in, etc., and THAT is what will be in the repo. > If you want to maintain your own personal version of it and make that > available too, then that's fine as far as I know, but the official repo > simply cannot be (or remain) the work of just one person. Thus, keeping > it light will indeed be a major challenge. > > That said, it sounds like the package managers weren't exactly friendly > either. Unable to explain the previous paragraph to the point of > acceptance (which I see as the author's right to refuse), they did what > they thought was the next best thing - a fork - but they botched the PR > side of that fork. The original developer understandably thought that > his work was being stolen by the poorly-chosen wording and lack of > acknowledgement, and thus we have the arguments of late. > > > > Is that a roughly-accurate summary? > > >
