4 ms·
"All of the sections in this post describing some aspect of the toxic culture fail to deliver, and mostly just sound like entitlement to this specific maintaine
by pmoriarty 6y ago
"All of the sections in this post describing some aspect of the toxic culture fail to deliver, and mostly just sound like entitlement to this specific maintainer's time"
How about this part?
"Taking Over People's Real Names
"The last straw concerned the policy about taking over inactive modules. About making it possible by default for someone to take over my very name, Aria Salvatrice, and releasing their own fork of my software under my name.
"That's right: if I'm inactive for just one short little month, someone else can just go ahead and release software under my name, my name as a person, with no process in place for me to reclaim it later, even if their releases have low quality standards, even if they add ill-conceived features that work against my long-term plans.
"I made it clear-as politely as I could, which was hard-that the policy was absolutely unreasonable. Absolutely no app store I ever heard of allows taking over names, much less taking over humans' first and last names.
"And in the domain of synthesizers, it is common to name a machine after the lead engineer. Bob Moog, Don Buchla, Serge Tcherepnin, Roger Linn, Ray Kurzweil, to name a just few well known pioneers. Many modules in the VCV library are named after their author, I am far from being an exception, I'm following a time-honored tradition.
"Open-source is no excuse. The code is open-souce, with a perfect understanding of what it entails. But my name isn't. That's why my logo is not directly drawn on the faceplate, but composited at runtime from a separate file: I'm trying to make it as easy as possible to modify my code.
"And while VCV is happy to claim ownership over the names of amateur humans like me, its "Ethics Guidelines" are absolutely deferential towards the moral rights to the name and trade dress of commercial brands: after all, there aren't many eurorack hardware makers, so they would never allow ports of their modules to be offered in VCV's store if they had to compete against counterfeit knock-offs impersonating them. But humans, now that's fair game?"
or this part:
[VCV's code of conduct now] says "public challenges to moderator decisions may result in a ban/suspension"
and:
"There's MiRack, a fork of VCV for Mac OS and iPhone. Any mention of it within the VCV community is immediately deleted, and its author is banned..."
To me none of this sounds like it has anything to do with "entitletment to this specific maintainer's time".
- malwrar 6y agoFair, but even these aren't really substantive either. > That's right: if I'm inactive for just one short little month, someone else can just go ahead and release software under my name, my name as a person, with no process in place for me to reclaim it later Later they link an Ethics Guidelines document which indicates that stealing names won't go unpunished, not sure why the author doesn't think that'd extend to the collection of modules they made. > public challenges to moderator decisions may result in a ban/suspension That's pretty common on forums. I think it's still fair to critique, but like the first point it's based in a lack of faith in the maintainer which can't really be addressed by anybody. > ...Any mention of it within the VCV community is immediately deleted, and its author is banned What conclusion am I supposed to draw from this fact outside of the fact that some weird disagreement happened at some point between two people? Am I supposed to conclude the maintainer is the bad guy here? No smoking gun, no clear victims, no crime in my eyes.
- bastawhiz 6y ago> stealing names won't go unpunished, not sure why the author doesn't think that'd extend to the collection of modules they made. Why is it even possible in the first place? Why even have this absurd thirty day system?
- malwrar 6y agoGood question, I think it's dumb too. I guess people might create a package, abandon it, then fall off the face of the earth? The modular synth community is still pretty indie, and there's a lot of homegrown modules out there. I figure this is probably intended to free up cool-sounding names that are abandoned. The maintainer just never considered that people might take month-long breaks, or might have thought the ethics policy would be enough to deal with the probably practically rare threat of bad-faith actors.
- bastawhiz 6y agoIt's like if github said that someone could just take over your account and all its repos if you took a sabbatical. That's an absolutely wild policy