I think one of the most significant things about open source is that you're allowed to port it to new platforms. Imagine if you were porting some MIT or GPL ope

I think one of the most significant things about open source is that you're allowed to port it to new platforms. Imagine if you were porting some MIT or GPL open source application from Windows to Linux, and then the original author of an open source library used by the software you were porting told you that they hate Linux and don't want you to port their library to Linux. Are you obligated to do so and therefore give up on making a direct port of the application to Linux? A lot of people seem to argue that while you're not obligated to follow the developer's request, that it's still proper for them to make an optional request like that. I still think it's improper for the developer to make a request like that without a good reason. Imagine instead that you were the author of that Windows application, you released it as open source in order to guarantee that your code could be used as much as possible, and you specifically chose open source dependencies so that this could happen and that your entire application would be open source. And then you hear years later that your application wasn't ported to a new platform because the developer of one of the dependencies, that you specifically picked because it said it was open source, made a vague request exactly against one of the core benefits of open source. You'd feel like that dependency author misled you by labeling their work as open source. Packaging the project in the NixOS repository seems to be equivalent to porting it to work in NixOS in the most standard way, and as far as I can tell, there's interest in packaging the project because it's a dependency of Home Assistant, an open source project that people want on NixOS. I think it's proper for a dependency developer in this situation to make requests to change the presentation of the code (like that NixOS fork and rename the project so users don't ask the original developer for support), but to make a request that potentially blocks an open source dependent program from being ported to another platform is bad. EDIT: Even weirder, apparently the developer themself added their library as a dependency to the open source Home Assistant project, and now after this they're getting in the way of Home Assistant being ported to other platforms! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27506141 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27506141 >But now that frenk added his code as a dependency, he has the right to transitively make Home Assistant un-packagable on NixOS?