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> I'm begging project leaders everywhere - please read up on the social contract and the consent of the governed. I do not need consent as I am not governing a

> I'm begging project leaders everywhere - please read up on the social contract and the consent of the governed. I do not need consent as I am not governing anyone like king or president governs. If someone is using my project they are also not really entitled to anything, beyond what stated in license and similar documents if any. If they dislike it, they can fork my project and go away. If someone wants to be entitled to anything, they are free to make a contract and pay for service they desire. But while many are happy to demand nearly noone is willing to help. Or even fork project. Instead they make entitled demand and treat open source developers as servants or slaves or their pets. No, you are not entitled to your preferred governance model to be used in my software project.

edent 11mo ago
I think you've read something into my post that I didn't intend. I'm specifically talking about the community of people who do contribute. If you look at the recent shenanigans of WordPress and Ruby, they are causing discontent within the existing organisation of contributors. Those contributors are, of course, free to fork off if they want. But if you're trying to build a long-term viable project, then you need a way to ensure that the people working with you are treated fairly.
- purple_turtle 11mo ago
  Post explicitly makes request to all project leaders: "I'm begging project leaders everywhere". As one of them I want to state that others, including you, are not entitled to decide how I run my project. I want to express that I am thankful that this one is phrased as suggestion. But I utterly reject that open source project is substantially similar to governing a country in responsibility and preferred setup. So I reject your analogy and suggestions as highly flawed.
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  - glenstein 11mo ago
    I don't take it as a request that you open your process to granular shot calling or feature requests from from users. Ignore them all you want! But I would put transition/succession in a different category. Maybe in a sense requesting your project have its own life-after-death counts as "shot calling" from your perspective because it's still essentially about what "they" want rather than a sober reflection on your time/capacity/interest, but I think at least that it's different from ordinary feature requests.
    - Aperocky 11mo ago
      It does sounds like forking is the right way to go in that case. Several successful product are forked and maintained after the original author lost interest without any involvement from them.
  - shkkmo 11mo ago
    > As one of them I want to state that others, including you, are not entitled to decide how I run my project. If that is the attitude that you take towards everyone who contributes to your project, then you probably aren't a very good leader. That is, of course, your right. But if you were interested in the long term survival of your project and attracting other developers to contribute, then it behooves you to consider the desires and needs of the community of contributors. > But I utterly reject that open source project is substantially similar to governing a country in responsibility and preferred setup. "Consent of the governed" is about countries, it is about leadership and where the privilege of leadership comes from. If you are leading a software project, does your authority come from god? Or does it come from the willingness of the people working on that project to listen to you? That is "consent of the governed".
    - purple_turtle 11mo ago
      > If that is the attitude that you take towards everyone who contributes to your project, then you probably aren't a very good leader. That is, of course, your right. Word "decide" was there deliberately. I am not fully opposed to consideration of suggestions made by others. Though I may consider them and reject, like here. And I will take opinions of contributors into much serious considerations than this blog post, for multiple reasons. From position of maintainer in one of projects: primary risk to the project is main author running into too many annoying people and focusing on other hobbies. And I in fact did it with one of projects. Some other maintainers also left. The same people who caused this by their entitlement are now complaining about project being stagnant. > Or does it come from the willingness of the people working on that project to listen to you? That is "consent of the governed". Major difference is that for countries if someone does not consent to decisions of ruler/parliament/etc. they have little to no recourse. It ranges from extremely hard to impossible to change law or national policies or migrate to another country. In comparison the worst case of forking open source project is much easier. Control of open source project is much weaker and people forced to contribute are fairly unusual and rare (though in such cases I would consider my responses to blog post to be not applying, my comments were more focused on hobby projects). If someone does not want to participate they may easily stop. This does massively differ from countries.
    - deleted 11mo ago
- peauc 11mo ago
  What kind of issues are you referencing with Ruby ? I have followed the Wordpress drama.
  - edent 11mo ago
    See, for example, https://joel.drapper.me/p/rubygems-takeover/ https://joel.drapper.me/p/rubygems-takeover/
    - jeltz 11mo ago
      As far as I know that is really the only example. And to clarify it is about a struggle between who controls Rubygems and Bundler, not Ruby itself. A key component to be sure but maybe not that relevant to this discussion when the ones running the infra hijacks the GitHub project. That was an inside coup.
  - beanjuiceII 11mo ago
    he will present one side of the ruby story and use that as the moral high ground
- lapcat 11mo ago
  > If you look at the recent shenanigans of WordPress and Ruby, they are causing discontent within the existing organisation of contributors. This is why I think the article is a bit of misdirection. Your criticism is about project governance not about project succession. You want the leaders of WordPress and Rails to step down now because you don't like how they behave in power, not because of the danger that the leaders might die or disappear and leave a power vacuum. I feel that the Mastodon example is a red herring here.
  - edent 11mo ago
    Governance and succession are intimately tied. I feel that part of the problem with WordPress and Rails is that that there is no model for replacing poor governance.
    - lapcat 11mo ago
      > I feel that part of the problem with WordPress and Rails is that that there is no model for replacing poor governance. But Eugen Rochko was not replaced. He voluntarily stepped down from power because he was personally dissatisfied in the leadership role. Nobody was calling for his ouster. He could have continued as leader of Mastodon for many more years with nobody batting an eyelash. So again, Mastodon is a red herring.
    - msh 11mo ago
      There is a model, it’s called forking the code.
      - tremon 11mo ago
        Forking the code fractures the community. The discussion at hand focuses on the community, not the code.
        cortesoft 11mo ago
        If you feel like you need to fork the code, the community is already fractured. If the community agrees with you that the original author is doing things wrong, and your new approach is better, they will move with you to the fork. If the rest of the community doesn't agree with you, they will stay. If some stay and some go, it means only some of them agreed with you. That's the thing about open source - you don't actually have to form a consensus. You can split off whenever you want.
- ecshafer 11mo ago
  Communists take over a country and millions of people die. Fascists take over and millions of people die. Wordpress is some legal issues that is going to result in a law suit and some word press developer having to work overtime. Ruby Bundler has some people losing maintainer access and some hurt feelings. Lets not compare apples and oranges here.
  - purple_turtle 11mo ago
    Or rather apples and planes. Or oranges and ICBMs.
- btilly 11mo ago
  Even if people are reading something into your post that you don't intend, they are reading it for good reason. Which is that your post sounds exactly like an attack on any technically competent person that runs an open source project. This fits squarely into a pattern that open source people deal with all of the time. Namely that someone tries to gain control of a project by appeals to "community", while subtly insulting the people who actually did the work. The result is toxic politics that, if it is left to stand, drives away technically competent contributors. And which makes leading that project a misery. If you don't want to come across this way, you absolutely need to get rid of rhetoric like the paragraph beginning with, "The last year has seen several BDFLs act like Mad Kings." Anyone who has encountered this antipattern will see exactly what that leads to. It is a rhetorical club that can be levied against any technically competent person who objects to something based on technical concerns. The self-proclaimed "community leader" doesn't need to address those technical concerns. They just need to imply the ad hominem. Suggest that the contributor is the would-be Mad King. There are a number of ways that this can end. All of them are bad. Now I'm not saying that you are bringing up an unimportant issue. But you REALLY need to check your tone if you wish to convince the people that you are supposedly addressing.
  - travisgriggs 11mo ago
    > Namely that someone tries to gain control of a project by appeals to "community", while subtly insulting the people who actually did the work. Lately, I’ve taken to labelling these different behaviors with D words: Doers, Discussers, Deciders, etc. It’s amazing to me how often people want to create a specialty for themselves, where the doing is relegated to the doers, but all the doing is dictated by others. This happens in businesses, NGOs, communities, churches, just about everywhere.
    - btilly 11mo ago
      It isn't amazing when you see how it tends to work out for those who succeed in a corporate context. There is a natural competition to become an "idea person" in an organization. If the project goes well, the idea person gets the credit. If the project goes poorly, the people who actually built it get the blame. And it takes far less work to produce promising ideas, than to actually build stuff. The result is that succeeding in getting other people to implement your ideas becomes a fast track to promotion. Unfortunately, the farther that you get from the actual implementation, the worse your ideas get. Compounding that is the fact that the ideas that convince executives far too often are the ones that play buzzword bingo in the right way, rather than the ones which are grounded in pragmatism. This is why I've learned to be suspicious of anyone with a job title of "architect". Some are amazingly good. But most that I've dealt with, are decidedly not. But when you hear them talk about it, they always sound like they are amazing.
- trueismywork 11mo ago
  Even those contributors are not entitled to anything apart from what the license allows. Recent events like terraform-opentofu have shown that the actual name has no moat. People will migrate quickly to where rhe community is. So as long as license is good and there's no CLA, everything is fine.
- msteffen 11mo ago
  In support of your point, after Hashicorp relicensed Terraform (thereby killing, or at least squeezing, a lot of Terraform consultancies who had collectively contributed a massive amount to Terraform and prompting the creation of OpenTofu), Oxide and Friends spent several episodes discussing what was reasonable for open source maintainers to do. They had a great discussion with Kelsey Hightower about it[^1], and his answer (which I liked a lot) was basically just that maintainers’ only real obligation was to be transparent about governance. If you want to be a dictator and ignore bugs and contributions that aren’t personally compelling to you, that’s fine—but please just put that in the repo. That way, people who are trying to build a business on open source work and want customers, or to build trust with users for any other reason, can distinguish themselves from maintainers that don’t care (as is their right). Otherwise the reputation of Open Source as a whole suffers. [^1]: The whole episode is good but here’s the part where Kelsey argues that people just need to be transparent: https://youtu.be/13ctYOu8TsA?si=cI8TwHX6tAaCwH6o&t=1320 https://youtu.be/13ctYOu8TsA?si=cI8TwHX6tAaCwH6o&t=1320
hiddencost 11mo ago
[flagged]
- purple_turtle 11mo ago
  And this is fine! Dying or failed open source project due to bad leader will not result in nightmares caused by unsuitable kings, fuhrers, presidents, supreme leaders and first secretaries.
  - webnrrd2k 11mo ago
    Lots of people died in the First and Second World Wars. As far as I know, no one died in the First or Second Browser Wars.
- zwnow 11mo ago
  Meaningful community relationships are good faith relationships. The community is not entitled to anything unless willing to compensate the amount of work a new _thing_ requires. If something is open source, they are also capable of creating PRs themselves if they are missing anything. There's nothing wrong with asking for features, demanding them is where the relationship goes bad. Hell, even maintaining the project shouldn't be demanded without compensation.
  - ktallett 11mo ago
    This! It is up to the project creator to do as they please. A community can't demand.
gwbas1c 11mo ago
The thing to keep in mind is that widely successful open source projects are bigger than the single person who started the project. These simply can't be forked without broad consensus around which fork to follow. The author (who also responded) isn't referring to small libraries or utilities that are written by a single person and don't have much public contribution.
- Aperocky 11mo ago
  > These simply can't be forked without broad consensus around which fork to follow. They can and the user will decide.
  - shkkmo 11mo ago
    Unnecessary hard forks can wast a buch of time and effort while damaging the community if they are contentious and part of a "non-peaceful" transition of power. Designing your governance and succession structure to avoid this is better for the long term health of your project.
- Lerc 11mo ago
  There seems to be a notion of 'Too big to fork' I don't think it is true. Certainly it takes more work. Broad consensus may be part of that work. If you cannot reach consensus to produce an equal product as a unilateral decision maker then the benefits of dictatorship are still outweighing the disadvantages. If another unilateral decision maker runs a fork, people may move to it if it is better. That's them voting, it's not dictatorship, it's representative democracy.
- School-Cotton 11mo ago
  The Linux kernel has probably dozens of actively developed forks.
  - gwbas1c 11mo ago
    Do they usually take upstream changes from the main kernel? If so, then they aren't the kind of forks we're discussing. Think of a different scenario: Linus does something that pisses a lot of people off. (Even more than usual) The biggest contributors decide they don't want him in charge. The users don't want anything to do with him. A few of the most influential contributors announce a fork, some of the fans publicize it, and then the major distros base themselves off of the new fork. At this point none of the forks that you're referring to take upstream changes from Linux, instead they take them from the new fork.
jjice 11mo ago
Completely agreed. There has always been bits of entitlement to open source projects by users, but I feel like increase in package managers and ecosystems (which I think is generally a good thing) has lead to a _huge_ increase in people being entitled assholes to maintainers. Just look like the GitHub issues of a fairly large package with a single maintainer. The demanding attitude from someone who wants a feature that doesn't even make sense for the package to an individual who has a separate full time job and a family who does this for the love of the game is very upsetting.
- Nevermark 11mo ago
  There really should be a donation field “Estimated resolution cost” with payment options, associated with any user request. With a default payment preset by the maintainer to optimize mindfulness. “I am here to help, but you shall pay with your cash or your cheap guilty soul!”
  - rincebrain 11mo ago
    The problem with that is that there's a number of examples about how your entitlement increases markedly when you feel you have paid for something. So if you don't have enough hours in the day, more money doesn't solve that problem unless it can displace other things in your schedule, and can make the number of people attempting to impose, and their attitudes, worse.
    - Nevermark 11mo ago
      Good point. I feel like there should be a simple solution for this. You know, dealing with humans. But they are not simple.
      - rincebrain 11mo ago
        The largest problem with dealing with humans is handling both good and bad faith cases. In particular, if you can't rely on the escalation path being willing to rule a lawsuit is "bloody stupid" if you offer, say, a discount on "all fruits" and someone tries to argue milk is a fruit, then you wind up with endless escalations of rules lawyering and perverse effects.
zahlman 11mo ago
I think this criticism doesn't go far enough. As https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45980503 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45980503 says, the criticism appears to be more about governance than succession. But then, the next sentence after your quote is: > Or, if reading is too woke, just behave like grown-ups rather than squabbling tweenagers. To me, this makes it abundantly clear that the goal is to associate leadership the author doesn't like with politics the author doesn't like. It's in a "behold, Goofus and Gallant" style of diatribe that I've seen a few times before and it always rubs me the wrong way. Yes, a lot of FOSS projects have seen friction between the official leadership[1] and major players in the community. But it seems to come in three major forms: the kind where the conflict is expected and part of how those people have gotten along historically for years[2]; the kind where the players are trying to stage a coup because they don't like the leadership's { real-world politics, social status, opinion of pineapple on pizza, ... } expressed entirely outside of development spaces; and the kind where the project is already forked but at least one party can't leave the other alone (sometimes because the project is really more about infrastructure/platform than software; sometimes because leadership kicked someone out, in an inverse of the previous situation). But swipes like the above instantly throw out all nuance and good will, and effectively round everything off to "all these bad things happen because some people just can't behave themselves, which conveniently correlates with a caricature of my own political adversaries". 1. There are plenty of cases showing that moving away from the BDFL model doesn't actually fix the problem. 2. Believe it or not, many people actually enjoy operating that way. I hold that people who don't have no business telling people who do to cut it out.
corry 11mo ago
You've got your finger on the pulse of something that open source has always represented to me: freedom of the creator and others to just... do what they want with it (subject to the license of course). Don't like what the main developer is doing with it? You're free to fork and continue on your way if they don't see it your way. If you lack the skills or time to do that, that's your problem - you're not entitled to the maintainers' labor. The freedom cuts both ways, and by adding in elements of social contracts and other overlays onto the otherwise relatively pure freedom represented by OSS, you end up with the worst of both worlds. THAT ALL SAID - there's an important distinction between a given piece of software that's open source versus a "true project", which is larger-scale, more contributors involved, might be part of mission-critical systems, etc, where the social dynamics DO need to careful thought and management. But even that seems to be more a question of specific types of OSS business models which is related but not the same as the licenses and overall social dynamics around OSS projects.
- fellowniusmonk 11mo ago
  Before it becomes anything else code is first and foremost art & personal expression. Code is a very fun form of literature at heart. Other attributes may be tacked on later, it may be integrated into and transform into an engine or company that has rules and regulations. If the author treats it as only art, with license choices, etc. then they aren't entitled to treat it like anything at all, it's literally their personal expression. And this is recognized in the physical world as well. More than people realize, some buildings that are incredibly dangerous are considered sculpture effectively. There is a rickety castle built by mostly one guy in CO that meets this criteria.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- preisschild 11mo ago
  > If you lack the skills or time to do that, that's your problem - you're not entitled to the maintainers' labor. Or give the maintainer money if he wants :)
- dogleash 11mo ago
tracker1 11mo ago
I'm with you on this... The whole article just seems like insidious, communist take over of what other people create. It usually starts with a Code of Conduct decree.. it ends with people who don't actually write software acting as authoritarian dictators in a software banana republic.
- keyringlight 11mo ago
  The other thing in the back of my mind is the Jia Tan situation with XZ utils, that was a gentle and gradual social engineered takeover.
- purple_turtle 11mo ago
  Why it would be specifically communist?
  - ecshafer 11mo ago
    Communists have little respect for other people's independence and want to control their labor, usually collective your farm/factory or you are shot is their MO. Capitalists rely on voluntary exchange of labor through payment. Source: The Russian Revolution, The Cuban Revolution, The Chinese Revolution, The Cambodian Revolution, North Korea, Vietnamese Revolution.
imiric 11mo ago
I've read this sentiment often on this forum, and I suppose it shouldn't surprise me given that most people here share the entrepreneurial mindset. But it still rubs me the wrong way, and I'll write about it again. What I don't like about this idea that the role of open source authors ends with throwing some code over the fence, relinquishing any responsibility for it beyond what their chosen license dictates, is that it completely ignores the community aspect that forms around software, and in large part, contributes to the success of OSS. Software is written for people. Open source software explicitly invites collaboration, and sharing of knowledge. When someone sees people asking for help, and making feature and improvement suggestions, as "demands" from "entitled" users, they're completely missing this point of community. When they additionally require or suggest that no work will be done unless these entitled users pay up, it's no different from source available, proprietary or commercial software at that point. Of course your work should be compensated, and you shouldn't be expected to work for free. You are free to choose any number of viable business models to ensure that happens. But demanding this from your users is essentially putting the software behind a paywall. It also signals to users that the direction of the project is dictated not by a community of passionate users, but by whoever pays the most, which is a twisted incentive for any software. My point is: there is more to OSS than the code and the license. Despite what some may claim, there is an unwritten social contract which is created when software is published in the open, whether the author decides to ignore this or not. Some authors do acknowledge this explicitly[1], which is a large factor in making their projects more successful than those from authors who decide to alienate their user base. [1]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-announce/1997/msg00017.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-announce/1997/msg00017.html
- evanelias 11mo ago
  > Open source software explicitly invites collaboration, and sharing of knowledge. The licenses permit that, but they explicitly do not "invite" it; they are totally neutral on that point. Upstream FOSS authors can reject all third-party contributions, and their software is still unarguably FOSS. > When someone sees people asking for help, and making feature and improvement suggestions, as "demands" from "entitled" users You're mischaracterizing the situation. It's usually about a specific small vocal subset of users, who are literally demanding things in a rude and arrogant manner. > Despite what some may claim, there is an unwritten social contract which is created when software is published in the open, whether the author decides to ignore this or not. "Unwritten social contracts" effectively only exist in cases where an overwhelming majority of people believe in the same set of social norms. That absolutely is not the case in the software industry. There's no broad agreement about what that social contract entails, or if it even exists, and therefore it de facto does not exist for the industry as a whole. Individual projects can choose their own social norms, but that doesn't inherently extend those norms to the entire industry.
grokgrok 11mo ago
You've drawn a neat dialectic between the hobbyist technophile and the community builder. If you want the help that you seem to eschew as rare, you could: share control through the delineation of roles, earn collective buy-in (consensus is built through some collective deliberation process, e.g democracy); otherwise, you're within your rights as individual. Those who expect that "those who work will work for me" (the enslaver mentality) ... they also need boning up on social contract theory -- which as a leader you could nudge those individuals back towards good citizenship and maybe even gain useful support, but that's just your opportunity and not an imperative.
dsr_ 11mo ago
In fact, you only have consent. People who don't want to work with you don't have to; everyone who does want to work with you only does so because of mutual consent. Act badly and they will walk away.
jancsika 11mo ago
> If they dislike it, they can fork my project and go away. I definitely agree with you here. Forking, almost by definition, means the "D" in BDFL is a joke. The author pretending that "D" is deadly serious is an incredibly counterproductive and passive-aggressive way to express their concern. Still, the question remains-- if your project has more than a single developer, have you communicated to your project members who you think has the best knowledge and ability to take over after you're gone? If the only developer is you then the question is moot. Otherwise, it's false modesty to pretend that's none of your business.

edent 11mo ago

I think you've read something into my post that I didn't intend. I'm specifically talking about the community of people who do contribute. If you look at the recent shenanigans of WordPress and Ruby, they are causing discontent within the existing organisation of contributors. Those contributors are, of course, free to fork off if they want. But if you're trying to build a long-term viable project, then you need a way to ensure that the people working with you are treated fairly.

purple_turtle 11mo ago
Post explicitly makes request to all project leaders: "I'm begging project leaders everywhere". As one of them I want to state that others, including you, are not entitled to decide how I run my project. I want to express that I am thankful that this one is phrased as suggestion. But I utterly reject that open source project is substantially similar to governing a country in responsibility and preferred setup. So I reject your analogy and suggestions as highly flawed.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- glenstein 11mo ago
  I don't take it as a request that you open your process to granular shot calling or feature requests from from users. Ignore them all you want! But I would put transition/succession in a different category. Maybe in a sense requesting your project have its own life-after-death counts as "shot calling" from your perspective because it's still essentially about what "they" want rather than a sober reflection on your time/capacity/interest, but I think at least that it's different from ordinary feature requests.
  - Aperocky 11mo ago
    It does sounds like forking is the right way to go in that case. Several successful product are forked and maintained after the original author lost interest without any involvement from them.
- shkkmo 11mo ago
  > As one of them I want to state that others, including you, are not entitled to decide how I run my project. If that is the attitude that you take towards everyone who contributes to your project, then you probably aren't a very good leader. That is, of course, your right. But if you were interested in the long term survival of your project and attracting other developers to contribute, then it behooves you to consider the desires and needs of the community of contributors. > But I utterly reject that open source project is substantially similar to governing a country in responsibility and preferred setup. "Consent of the governed" is about countries, it is about leadership and where the privilege of leadership comes from. If you are leading a software project, does your authority come from god? Or does it come from the willingness of the people working on that project to listen to you? That is "consent of the governed".
  - purple_turtle 11mo ago
    > If that is the attitude that you take towards everyone who contributes to your project, then you probably aren't a very good leader. That is, of course, your right. Word "decide" was there deliberately. I am not fully opposed to consideration of suggestions made by others. Though I may consider them and reject, like here. And I will take opinions of contributors into much serious considerations than this blog post, for multiple reasons. From position of maintainer in one of projects: primary risk to the project is main author running into too many annoying people and focusing on other hobbies. And I in fact did it with one of projects. Some other maintainers also left. The same people who caused this by their entitlement are now complaining about project being stagnant. > Or does it come from the willingness of the people working on that project to listen to you? That is "consent of the governed". Major difference is that for countries if someone does not consent to decisions of ruler/parliament/etc. they have little to no recourse. It ranges from extremely hard to impossible to change law or national policies or migrate to another country. In comparison the worst case of forking open source project is much easier. Control of open source project is much weaker and people forced to contribute are fairly unusual and rare (though in such cases I would consider my responses to blog post to be not applying, my comments were more focused on hobby projects). If someone does not want to participate they may easily stop. This does massively differ from countries.
  - deleted 11mo ago
peauc 11mo ago
What kind of issues are you referencing with Ruby ? I have followed the Wordpress drama.
- edent 11mo ago
  See, for example, https://joel.drapper.me/p/rubygems-takeover/ https://joel.drapper.me/p/rubygems-takeover/
  - jeltz 11mo ago
    As far as I know that is really the only example. And to clarify it is about a struggle between who controls Rubygems and Bundler, not Ruby itself. A key component to be sure but maybe not that relevant to this discussion when the ones running the infra hijacks the GitHub project. That was an inside coup.
- beanjuiceII 11mo ago
  he will present one side of the ruby story and use that as the moral high ground
lapcat 11mo ago
> If you look at the recent shenanigans of WordPress and Ruby, they are causing discontent within the existing organisation of contributors. This is why I think the article is a bit of misdirection. Your criticism is about project governance not about project succession. You want the leaders of WordPress and Rails to step down now because you don't like how they behave in power, not because of the danger that the leaders might die or disappear and leave a power vacuum. I feel that the Mastodon example is a red herring here.
- edent 11mo ago
  Governance and succession are intimately tied. I feel that part of the problem with WordPress and Rails is that that there is no model for replacing poor governance.
  - lapcat 11mo ago
    > I feel that part of the problem with WordPress and Rails is that that there is no model for replacing poor governance. But Eugen Rochko was not replaced. He voluntarily stepped down from power because he was personally dissatisfied in the leadership role. Nobody was calling for his ouster. He could have continued as leader of Mastodon for many more years with nobody batting an eyelash. So again, Mastodon is a red herring.
  - msh 11mo ago
    There is a model, it’s called forking the code.
    - tremon 11mo ago
      Forking the code fractures the community. The discussion at hand focuses on the community, not the code.
      - cortesoft 11mo ago
        If you feel like you need to fork the code, the community is already fractured. If the community agrees with you that the original author is doing things wrong, and your new approach is better, they will move with you to the fork. If the rest of the community doesn't agree with you, they will stay. If some stay and some go, it means only some of them agreed with you. That's the thing about open source - you don't actually have to form a consensus. You can split off whenever you want.
ecshafer 11mo ago
Communists take over a country and millions of people die. Fascists take over and millions of people die. Wordpress is some legal issues that is going to result in a law suit and some word press developer having to work overtime. Ruby Bundler has some people losing maintainer access and some hurt feelings. Lets not compare apples and oranges here.
- purple_turtle 11mo ago
  Or rather apples and planes. Or oranges and ICBMs.
btilly 11mo ago
Even if people are reading something into your post that you don't intend, they are reading it for good reason. Which is that your post sounds exactly like an attack on any technically competent person that runs an open source project. This fits squarely into a pattern that open source people deal with all of the time. Namely that someone tries to gain control of a project by appeals to "community", while subtly insulting the people who actually did the work. The result is toxic politics that, if it is left to stand, drives away technically competent contributors. And which makes leading that project a misery. If you don't want to come across this way, you absolutely need to get rid of rhetoric like the paragraph beginning with, "The last year has seen several BDFLs act like Mad Kings." Anyone who has encountered this antipattern will see exactly what that leads to. It is a rhetorical club that can be levied against any technically competent person who objects to something based on technical concerns. The self-proclaimed "community leader" doesn't need to address those technical concerns. They just need to imply the ad hominem. Suggest that the contributor is the would-be Mad King. There are a number of ways that this can end. All of them are bad. Now I'm not saying that you are bringing up an unimportant issue. But you REALLY need to check your tone if you wish to convince the people that you are supposedly addressing.
- travisgriggs 11mo ago
  > Namely that someone tries to gain control of a project by appeals to "community", while subtly insulting the people who actually did the work. Lately, I’ve taken to labelling these different behaviors with D words: Doers, Discussers, Deciders, etc. It’s amazing to me how often people want to create a specialty for themselves, where the doing is relegated to the doers, but all the doing is dictated by others. This happens in businesses, NGOs, communities, churches, just about everywhere.
  - btilly 11mo ago
    It isn't amazing when you see how it tends to work out for those who succeed in a corporate context. There is a natural competition to become an "idea person" in an organization. If the project goes well, the idea person gets the credit. If the project goes poorly, the people who actually built it get the blame. And it takes far less work to produce promising ideas, than to actually build stuff. The result is that succeeding in getting other people to implement your ideas becomes a fast track to promotion. Unfortunately, the farther that you get from the actual implementation, the worse your ideas get. Compounding that is the fact that the ideas that convince executives far too often are the ones that play buzzword bingo in the right way, rather than the ones which are grounded in pragmatism. This is why I've learned to be suspicious of anyone with a job title of "architect". Some are amazingly good. But most that I've dealt with, are decidedly not. But when you hear them talk about it, they always sound like they are amazing.
trueismywork 11mo ago
Even those contributors are not entitled to anything apart from what the license allows. Recent events like terraform-opentofu have shown that the actual name has no moat. People will migrate quickly to where rhe community is. So as long as license is good and there's no CLA, everything is fine.
msteffen 11mo ago
In support of your point, after Hashicorp relicensed Terraform (thereby killing, or at least squeezing, a lot of Terraform consultancies who had collectively contributed a massive amount to Terraform and prompting the creation of OpenTofu), Oxide and Friends spent several episodes discussing what was reasonable for open source maintainers to do. They had a great discussion with Kelsey Hightower about it[^1], and his answer (which I liked a lot) was basically just that maintainers’ only real obligation was to be transparent about governance. If you want to be a dictator and ignore bugs and contributions that aren’t personally compelling to you, that’s fine—but please just put that in the repo. That way, people who are trying to build a business on open source work and want customers, or to build trust with users for any other reason, can distinguish themselves from maintainers that don’t care (as is their right). Otherwise the reputation of Open Source as a whole suffers. [^1]: The whole episode is good but here’s the part where Kelsey argues that people just need to be transparent: https://youtu.be/13ctYOu8TsA?si=cI8TwHX6tAaCwH6o&t=1320 https://youtu.be/13ctYOu8TsA?si=cI8TwHX6tAaCwH6o&t=1320

hiddencost 11mo ago

[flagged]

purple_turtle 11mo ago
And this is fine! Dying or failed open source project due to bad leader will not result in nightmares caused by unsuitable kings, fuhrers, presidents, supreme leaders and first secretaries.
- webnrrd2k 11mo ago
  Lots of people died in the First and Second World Wars. As far as I know, no one died in the First or Second Browser Wars.
zwnow 11mo ago
Meaningful community relationships are good faith relationships. The community is not entitled to anything unless willing to compensate the amount of work a new _thing_ requires. If something is open source, they are also capable of creating PRs themselves if they are missing anything. There's nothing wrong with asking for features, demanding them is where the relationship goes bad. Hell, even maintaining the project shouldn't be demanded without compensation.
- ktallett 11mo ago
  This! It is up to the project creator to do as they please. A community can't demand.

gwbas1c 11mo ago

The thing to keep in mind is that widely successful open source projects are bigger than the single person who started the project. These simply can't be forked without broad consensus around which fork to follow. The author (who also responded) isn't referring to small libraries or utilities that are written by a single person and don't have much public contribution.

Aperocky 11mo ago
> These simply can't be forked without broad consensus around which fork to follow. They can and the user will decide.
- shkkmo 11mo ago
  Unnecessary hard forks can wast a buch of time and effort while damaging the community if they are contentious and part of a "non-peaceful" transition of power. Designing your governance and succession structure to avoid this is better for the long term health of your project.
Lerc 11mo ago
There seems to be a notion of 'Too big to fork' I don't think it is true. Certainly it takes more work. Broad consensus may be part of that work. If you cannot reach consensus to produce an equal product as a unilateral decision maker then the benefits of dictatorship are still outweighing the disadvantages. If another unilateral decision maker runs a fork, people may move to it if it is better. That's them voting, it's not dictatorship, it's representative democracy.
School-Cotton 11mo ago
The Linux kernel has probably dozens of actively developed forks.
- gwbas1c 11mo ago
  Do they usually take upstream changes from the main kernel? If so, then they aren't the kind of forks we're discussing. Think of a different scenario: Linus does something that pisses a lot of people off. (Even more than usual) The biggest contributors decide they don't want him in charge. The users don't want anything to do with him. A few of the most influential contributors announce a fork, some of the fans publicize it, and then the major distros base themselves off of the new fork. At this point none of the forks that you're referring to take upstream changes from Linux, instead they take them from the new fork.

jjice 11mo ago

Completely agreed. There has always been bits of entitlement to open source projects by users, but I feel like increase in package managers and ecosystems (which I think is generally a good thing) has lead to a _huge_ increase in people being entitled assholes to maintainers. Just look like the GitHub issues of a fairly large package with a single maintainer. The demanding attitude from someone who wants a feature that doesn't even make sense for the package to an individual who has a separate full time job and a family who does this for the love of the game is very upsetting.

Nevermark 11mo ago
There really should be a donation field “Estimated resolution cost” with payment options, associated with any user request. With a default payment preset by the maintainer to optimize mindfulness. “I am here to help, but you shall pay with your cash or your cheap guilty soul!”
- rincebrain 11mo ago
  The problem with that is that there's a number of examples about how your entitlement increases markedly when you feel you have paid for something. So if you don't have enough hours in the day, more money doesn't solve that problem unless it can displace other things in your schedule, and can make the number of people attempting to impose, and their attitudes, worse.
  - Nevermark 11mo ago
    Good point. I feel like there should be a simple solution for this. You know, dealing with humans. But they are not simple.
    - rincebrain 11mo ago
      The largest problem with dealing with humans is handling both good and bad faith cases. In particular, if you can't rely on the escalation path being willing to rule a lawsuit is "bloody stupid" if you offer, say, a discount on "all fruits" and someone tries to argue milk is a fruit, then you wind up with endless escalations of rules lawyering and perverse effects.

zahlman 11mo ago

I think this criticism doesn't go far enough. As https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45980503 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45980503 says, the criticism appears to be more about governance than succession. But then, the next sentence after your quote is: > Or, if reading is too woke, just behave like grown-ups rather than squabbling tweenagers. To me, this makes it abundantly clear that the goal is to associate leadership the author doesn't like with politics the author doesn't like. It's in a "behold, Goofus and Gallant" style of diatribe that I've seen a few times before and it always rubs me the wrong way. Yes, a lot of FOSS projects have seen friction between the official leadership[1] and major players in the community. But it seems to come in three major forms: the kind where the conflict is expected and part of how those people have gotten along historically for years[2]; the kind where the players are trying to stage a coup because they don't like the leadership's { real-world politics, social status, opinion of pineapple on pizza, ... } expressed entirely outside of development spaces; and the kind where the project is already forked but at least one party can't leave the other alone (sometimes because the project is really more about infrastructure/platform than software; sometimes because leadership kicked someone out, in an inverse of the previous situation). But swipes like the above instantly throw out all nuance and good will, and effectively round everything off to "all these bad things happen because some people just can't behave themselves, which conveniently correlates with a caricature of my own political adversaries". 1. There are plenty of cases showing that moving away from the BDFL model doesn't actually fix the problem. 2. Believe it or not, many people actually enjoy operating that way. I hold that people who don't have no business telling people who do to cut it out.

corry 11mo ago

You've got your finger on the pulse of something that open source has always represented to me: freedom of the creator and others to just... do what they want with it (subject to the license of course). Don't like what the main developer is doing with it? You're free to fork and continue on your way if they don't see it your way. If you lack the skills or time to do that, that's your problem - you're not entitled to the maintainers' labor. The freedom cuts both ways, and by adding in elements of social contracts and other overlays onto the otherwise relatively pure freedom represented by OSS, you end up with the worst of both worlds. THAT ALL SAID - there's an important distinction between a given piece of software that's open source versus a "true project", which is larger-scale, more contributors involved, might be part of mission-critical systems, etc, where the social dynamics DO need to careful thought and management. But even that seems to be more a question of specific types of OSS business models which is related but not the same as the licenses and overall social dynamics around OSS projects.

fellowniusmonk 11mo ago
Before it becomes anything else code is first and foremost art & personal expression. Code is a very fun form of literature at heart. Other attributes may be tacked on later, it may be integrated into and transform into an engine or company that has rules and regulations. If the author treats it as only art, with license choices, etc. then they aren't entitled to treat it like anything at all, it's literally their personal expression. And this is recognized in the physical world as well. More than people realize, some buildings that are incredibly dangerous are considered sculpture effectively. There is a rickety castle built by mostly one guy in CO that meets this criteria.
deleted 11mo ago
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preisschild 11mo ago
> If you lack the skills or time to do that, that's your problem - you're not entitled to the maintainers' labor. Or give the maintainer money if he wants :)
dogleash 11mo ago

tracker1 11mo ago

I'm with you on this... The whole article just seems like insidious, communist take over of what other people create. It usually starts with a Code of Conduct decree.. it ends with people who don't actually write software acting as authoritarian dictators in a software banana republic.

keyringlight 11mo ago
The other thing in the back of my mind is the Jia Tan situation with XZ utils, that was a gentle and gradual social engineered takeover.
purple_turtle 11mo ago
Why it would be specifically communist?
- ecshafer 11mo ago
  Communists have little respect for other people's independence and want to control their labor, usually collective your farm/factory or you are shot is their MO. Capitalists rely on voluntary exchange of labor through payment. Source: The Russian Revolution, The Cuban Revolution, The Chinese Revolution, The Cambodian Revolution, North Korea, Vietnamese Revolution.

imiric 11mo ago

I've read this sentiment often on this forum, and I suppose it shouldn't surprise me given that most people here share the entrepreneurial mindset. But it still rubs me the wrong way, and I'll write about it again. What I don't like about this idea that the role of open source authors ends with throwing some code over the fence, relinquishing any responsibility for it beyond what their chosen license dictates, is that it completely ignores the community aspect that forms around software, and in large part, contributes to the success of OSS. Software is written for people. Open source software explicitly invites collaboration, and sharing of knowledge. When someone sees people asking for help, and making feature and improvement suggestions, as "demands" from "entitled" users, they're completely missing this point of community. When they additionally require or suggest that no work will be done unless these entitled users pay up, it's no different from source available, proprietary or commercial software at that point. Of course your work should be compensated, and you shouldn't be expected to work for free. You are free to choose any number of viable business models to ensure that happens. But demanding this from your users is essentially putting the software behind a paywall. It also signals to users that the direction of the project is dictated not by a community of passionate users, but by whoever pays the most, which is a twisted incentive for any software. My point is: there is more to OSS than the code and the license. Despite what some may claim, there is an unwritten social contract which is created when software is published in the open, whether the author decides to ignore this or not. Some authors do acknowledge this explicitly[1], which is a large factor in making their projects more successful than those from authors who decide to alienate their user base. [1]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-announce/1997/msg00017.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-announce/1997/msg00017.html

evanelias 11mo ago
> Open source software explicitly invites collaboration, and sharing of knowledge. The licenses permit that, but they explicitly do not "invite" it; they are totally neutral on that point. Upstream FOSS authors can reject all third-party contributions, and their software is still unarguably FOSS. > When someone sees people asking for help, and making feature and improvement suggestions, as "demands" from "entitled" users You're mischaracterizing the situation. It's usually about a specific small vocal subset of users, who are literally demanding things in a rude and arrogant manner. > Despite what some may claim, there is an unwritten social contract which is created when software is published in the open, whether the author decides to ignore this or not. "Unwritten social contracts" effectively only exist in cases where an overwhelming majority of people believe in the same set of social norms. That absolutely is not the case in the software industry. There's no broad agreement about what that social contract entails, or if it even exists, and therefore it de facto does not exist for the industry as a whole. Individual projects can choose their own social norms, but that doesn't inherently extend those norms to the entire industry.

grokgrok 11mo ago

You've drawn a neat dialectic between the hobbyist technophile and the community builder. If you want the help that you seem to eschew as rare, you could: share control through the delineation of roles, earn collective buy-in (consensus is built through some collective deliberation process, e.g democracy); otherwise, you're within your rights as individual. Those who expect that "those who work will work for me" (the enslaver mentality) ... they also need boning up on social contract theory -- which as a leader you could nudge those individuals back towards good citizenship and maybe even gain useful support, but that's just your opportunity and not an imperative.

dsr_ 11mo ago

In fact, you only have consent. People who don't want to work with you don't have to; everyone who does want to work with you only does so because of mutual consent. Act badly and they will walk away.

jancsika 11mo ago

> If they dislike it, they can fork my project and go away. I definitely agree with you here. Forking, almost by definition, means the "D" in BDFL is a joke. The author pretending that "D" is deadly serious is an incredibly counterproductive and passive-aggressive way to express their concern. Still, the question remains-- if your project has more than a single developer, have you communicated to your project members who you think has the best knowledge and ability to take over after you're gone? If the only developer is you then the question is moot. Otherwise, it's false modesty to pretend that's none of your business.