>thread to call out Read the Docs for profiting from MkDocs without contributing back.
>They also point out that not opening up the source code goes against the principles of Open Source software development
I will never stop being amused when people have feelings like this and also choose licenses like BSD (this project). If you wanted a culture that discouraged those behaviors, why would you choose a license that explicitly allows them? Whether you can enforce it or not, the license is basically a type of CoC that states the type of community you want to have.
The reason is simple: they'd like to reap all the benefits of a permissive licence (many people and companies won't or can't touch GPL code), without any of the downsides; but these downsides are the very reason behind the rules in more 'restrictive' licenses like the GPL.
This usually doesn't work, and in the end all they can do is complain about behaviours that their license choice explicitly allowed.
Yes I agree completely. I am baffled why they choose that license in the first place. It just seems to engender drama when people actually follow the license they've chosen! Perhaps open source is actually powered by drama, where developers have more meaning from the drama they create than the actual things they create?
Right, my suspicion was correct. When I interacted with them a few years ago they seemed perfectly nice and friendly, but seem to have gone off the rails more recently. It's an uncomfortable situation and I've a feeling people are afraid to discuss this kind of thing but we really need to. People are a risk factor in software projects and we need to be resilient to changes they face. Forking is the right way, but places like GitHub have sold people on centralisation. We need to get back to decentralised dev.
> but places like GitHub have sold people on centralisation. We need to get back to decentralised dev.
I don’t think that’s the case. It’s more of a marketing/market incentive. It’s great pr to be associated with the most famous project, way less so to be associated with a fork, at least until the fork becomes widespread and well recognised.
GitHub does make it fairly easy to fork a project, I wouldn’t blame the situation on github.
Just look at how much of the drama is caused by who "owns" the repository. In a decentralised model, which git perfectly supports, everybody owns their own branch(es). But all the issues etc. are stuck on the GitHub project.
> In a decentralised model, which git perfectly supports, everybody owns their own branch(es). But all the issues etc. are stuck on the GitHub project.
yeah i'm gonna call BS on this. this kind of drama already existed when communities were "decentralised" and each one had its own forum, mailing list or whatever.
the core of the issue here is about wanting to be the owner of a repository.
so people should just not bother with being owner of a specific repository, but just fork it and move on. and github supports forking sufficiently well for this purpose.
There are two main problems with "just fork" on GitHub and other forges:
1. Issues, PRs, discussions etc don't move over,
2. Discovery. When GitHub was in its infancy they made a big deal out of the "network" feature. Almost 20 years later it has languished, virtually unchanged in that entire time. When I think of decentralisation I think Bitcoin. We need a better way to "discover" the consensus fork. I feel like GitHub could do a lot to help, but they don't care.
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.
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
On one hand, that account of the attempted project takeover smelled to me like Jia Tan.
On the other hand, the comments the MkDocs author is making about perceived gender grievances feel so unhinged that I wouldn't be touching anything made by them with a barge pole.
Yes, I know you can be legit, but when you first contribute a few useful things, then jump to maintainership and want keys to the kingdom, the pattern looks similar (sans the last step which is embedding some backdoor). At least in how the article described it.
