I wanted to remind people about this drama from the creator of HA, Frenck toward Nix maintainers packaging Home-Assistant in nixpkgs.
If he behaves in this immature, dictatorial way, it is not a stretch to think that he will eventually close his source code and/or cash in on the popularity of his open source software like the Pi Foundation and OpenAI did to differing degrees.
TLDR; Frenck is convinced that he has the right to unilaterally mandate how people package his free, open source software and, in my opinion, will most likely behave with similar lack of integrity/lack of transparency with regards to profiteering off of his work eventually. We should fork the project ASAP to protect it from the power-hungry Luddite in charge (that reminds me of Spez).
Sorry but it makes no sense to me.
Please tell me: why in the world should a developer (of free software) invest any of his time into trying to understand what some packager/distributor does with his product?
Well, mostly for comms. You don’t want a flood of people getting pissed off at your project(s) for being poorly distributed and/or broken.
But it is a flood of people using a project in a way that it never was intended to be used in the first place.
Yes, HA is “weird” because it is an open source project that actually has significant amounts of funding (to which I contribute). But this isn’t a case of the authors and org deciding to support a new distribution platform. This is a case of a subset of community members deciding it should support that distribution platform and insisting that the project spin up knowledge and support for it.
That last part is wrong. Nixpkgs asks NOTHING of the maintainers of the original packages. We pride ourselves on being able to RELIABLY build any software out there using only what is available to build the package normally. We just add steps to make that REPRODUCIBLE because we think that is important. If someone went to Frenck about the issues, they certainly weren’t directed there by nixpkgs people.
Sure Jan.
Look. I don’t know much about your project or what it’s goals or ideology are. What I do know is that your behavior is tainting it and making me think your entire community are assists who call people terrorists for not supporting you.
Think about that
You should probably write a version of that to Frenck and yourself too. I’m just here pointing out shitty anti-open source behavior. Not sure how they makes me culpable…. But go off qween.
No, no, no. You just said above that the problem is because the developer did not understand something that nixos does or wants or whatever.
Yeah. He came to the nix people bitching because he didn’t understand their technology and chose to be mean rather than direct the questions to nixpkgs. He tried to obfuscate his code to punish nix people which goes directly against the open source license.
Maybe don’t come to them bitching if you don’t understand what you’re talking about?
Now I understand that you are personally involved and emotionally invested.
It would have suited you (and your case) well to make this transparent before calling somebody a dick etc.
This is so weird. There’s a lot of white knights in here shooting the messenger.
The “messenger” seems to have a lot of bias they are parading around as an objective truth.
From what I’ve read the “white knights” you appear to be referring to are pretty clearly either developers or people with programming experience. To my eye they appear to be pretty level headed and on point in their observations.
Have you heard the story of the man who was driving his car fast on the freeway when he heard a warning on the radio: a car on the freeway drives in the wrong direction! And he thinks “One? There must be hundreds…”
:-)