As a maintainer, it is his choice which patches to accept. If you're not happy with his decisions, choose another project, fork it, or pay someone to do it for you.
Sure, but that DOES NOT mean you're immune to criticism, especially when it comes to security.
Your type of argument could otherwise be used for pretty much everything - even large corporations. It's not useful.
No, if you pay for things, you have a contract and things are immediately different.
Find vulnerability. Already, awesome of you to have done. Issue patch request. That's 10x even better, you're a boon to the community. You submit it, it gets rejected, you find out why and it's the maintainer is just not feeling it or some other irrational reason. Fork, put in the readme why you forked, write a blog post without being a dick about it, done.
The article we're talking about is referring to the bloodbath of a Reddit pile-on. That's totally unacceptable behavior from an adult.
You should be able.to fix them yourself
That's the premise of OSS
if you don't want to pay for a cab or a driver, you should be able to drive
- full access to the source code
- full rights to modify it and use it as it was your own
There's no other guarantee.
So if someone writes some code that becomes highly popular, they have no obligation whatsoever to maintain it the way people want.
They don't even have to maintain it at all, if they don't want to!
It's out in the public, it's free, that's the end of the agreement on the creato's side.
If a writer gave away their writings for free, could people pretend that they write what people want them to write, the way they want?
Is it fair to judge the writer because the answer was "WONTFIX"?
But the reality is worse than that.
A lot of companies are literally making billions using OSS, but they are not paying for it, a lot of programmers are making a lot of money by assembling OSS for their clients, but they are not paying for it, hell most of them are not even contributing in _any_ way, what does entitle them to pretend the attention of the OSS maintainer or that the maintainer should act in a way or another, according to the "community" desires?
Even if I'm not paying them anything.
And you know what's a good form of criticism? An issue with an attached PR
if you accept that the open source projects are voluntary as an axiom then you in fact cannot criticize choices made by the volunteer.
here's an analogy: a homeless person asks for money. you don't give him money but buy him food. can the homeless person rightfully criticize you?
A homeless person asks for money. You don't give him money but give him some advice. Can the homeless person rightfully criticize you?
You can absolutely criticize choices made by volunteers. I don't think you need to think too deeply about this to imagine situations where few would object to criticizing a volunteer's behavior. An obvious one would be if an open source maintainer willfully included malware/etc. into their project - which, to many people, ignoring glaring security issues is vaguely equivalent.
I obviously don't think vitriol is warranted ever, but criticism obviously is from time-to-time.
you can criticize all you want as an exercise of your critical thinking faculties but the volunteer is not in anyway obligated to heed the criticism.
"it's my money/time and I'll spend it how I want, which includes burning it"
is the fundamental axiom. Given that that is the foundation what sense would it make to criticize that person for burning the money - it's right there in the premise that they're allowed to!
It's your analogy, you tell me.
> you can criticize all you want as an exercise of your critical thinking faculties but the volunteer is not in anyway obligated to heed the criticism.
Nobody said they were. Nobody's trying to punish the maintainer legally. That doesn't mean criticism won't be offered or warranted.
Here's another analogy: You have a right to be a jerk in real life. Nobody's going to physically or legally stop you, barring extreme circumstances. People will still criticize you for being a jerk, as is THEIR right.
>People will still criticize you for being a jerk, as is THEIR right.
completely specious. code in a github repo is not active participation in society. the fact that it's public does not mean it's been submitted for evaluation in any way. criticizing a thing that wasn't critically submitted is meaningless. it's like calling my practice sketches inferior to commissioned pieces - no shit that's the point!
the maintainer?
> completely specious. code in a github repo is not active participation in society. the fact that it's public does not mean it's been submitted for evaluation in any way. criticizing a think that wasn't critically submitted is meaningless. it's like calling my practice sketches inferior to commissioned pieces - no shit that's the point!
Uh, what? By packaging something as a crate, by listing it on crates.io, you're submitting it to be used. If you don't want it to be used or evaluated, at all, why in the world would you publish something as a crate on a public registry?
This is more like submitting your sketches to a public art gallery and then being upset when the public criticizes it.
that's not what happened. there weren't simply discussions of the viability or soundness or the crate. there were implicit/explicit demands for changes. so your analogy is wrong again - it would be like submitting public sketches and then facing demands that the sketches be improved. does that sound like something that i as the artist should be comfortable with? more importantly does that sound like something a reasonable person would do (make demands for alterations to sketches submitted to a public art gallery)?
Are you sure you have a firm grasp on what actually transpired here?
maybe a better analogy is if i play a pickup game of basketball and i get labeled a bad player for not trying my hardest. it's not that the criticism is misplaced it's that it doesn't make sense at all - i wasn't trying to be a good player! i was trying to have fun.
I don’t understand the desire to make this out to be a sort of dichotomy—both groups have the right to do what they did (the maintainer to reject patches and even allegedly lie about the security properties of his project and the critics to criticize even in bad taste) and both parties could have handled it better. TFA did a fine job for implicitly acknowledging this by simply referring to the situation as sad all around.
this is so weird to me. i have a really difficult time on hn often because i don't understand why people that claim to be intelligent can't distill out the fundamental/primary issues.
it's a free/proffered/donation/voluntary/no strings attached piece of code. that is the first thing that defines its use/understanding/existence/ontology whatever other words. everything else is contingent upon that. you can debate this point - you can say something about the social contract of open source software and your responsibility to the community if you yourself have benefited from other open source projects and etc but no one is debating this. everyone is debating aposteriori things.
if i put a mattress out on the street with a sign "no bed bugs" and you pick it up and it has bed bugs in can you be mad at me? can you take action against me?
i don't know what kind of framework i need to appeal to in order to underscore this issue so that people address it directly instead of things further down the line. i would really appreciate someone showing me how to either do this (put the focus on the thing i'm engaging with) or tell me why i'm wrong for focusing on that.
I feel the same way, but not about /u/weberc2's post.
> it's a free/proffered/donation/voluntary/no strings attached piece of code. that is the first thing that defines its use/understanding/existence/ontology whatever other words. everything else is contingent upon that.
This is another of your own axioms. These aren't universal. In particular, if a maintainer states or otherwise implies that his project is secure and suitable for production and then behaves otherwise, criticism is warranted. Even if he doesn't, criticism is still permissible.
> you can debate this point - you can say something about the social contract of open source software and your responsibility to the community if you yourself have benefited from other open source projects and etc but no one is debating this. everyone is debating aposteriori things.
No one is debating this because it's not necessary. The maintainer's explicit assertions about his project (its security, etc) override implicit "social contract" responsibilities.
> if i put a mattress out on the street with a sign "no bed bugs" and you pick it up and it has bed bugs in can you be mad at me? can you take action against me?
Not sure, but I can certainly criticize you.
> i don't know what kind of framework i need to appeal to in order to underscore this issue so that people address it directly instead of things further down the line. i would really appreciate someone showing me how to either do this (put the focus on the thing i'm engaging with) or tell me why i'm wrong for focusing on that.
In general your arguments are based on your own axioms. If your axioms aren't widely-shared, then you will run into these sorts of disagreements.
how is this my axiom? it's on github. no one has paid for a license (the license is completely permissive).
>In particular, if a maintainer states or otherwise implies that his project is secure and suitable for production and then behaves otherwise, criticism is warranted.
is that part of the TOS of github? is that part of the bylaws of the guild of software engineers? is that in the bible? where is this codified except in this thread around this issue where everyone is mad?
>Not sure, but I can certainly criticize you.
you can do whatever you want. you can stand on your head and recite the star spangled banner. i'm posing the question whether it's reasonable. is it reasonable to criticize me for putting that mattress there in that state?
>In general your arguments are based on your own axioms
again they're not mine in the least - i did not coin the phrase "don't look a gift horse in the mouth". that is much older than me and fairly universally understood/accepted.
The trouble is distinguishing the cases.
But our society does not just openly accept giving criticism. There are rules. Unwritten and extremely vague ones, no doubt, but still social rules. This is especially so when criticizing something a person is providing for free. In this incident, did the criticism cross the boundary and violate those rules? It seems so. Many people likely gave respectful criticism that followed the rules but they appear to have been drowned out by those who did not.
The problem wasn't the criticism, but the expectation that said criticism invokes a certain behavior of the maintainer.
You can criticize open source maintenance by creating a fork in which you outline your vision (e.g. "much less use of 'unsafe' in the web package") - and deal with the burden of being a maintainer.
Everything else is just trying to force people to do stuff for you, and that's rude.
> The problem wasn't the criticism, but the expectation that said criticism invokes a certain behavior of the maintainer.
Of course it implies that the maintainer should change. All criticism implies an expectation of change, at least when the opportunity to change is still available.
> Everything else is just trying to force people to do stuff for you, and that's rude.
Criticism isn't "force" or "attempted force". This is just criticism. If you think criticism is rude, that's fine. Hypocritical, but fine.
You can't rationally say the maintainer is within his rights for rejecting security patches and then argue that critics are wrong for criticizing these practices.
No, the attempt to make somebody do what you want by brigading is what's attempting to exert force and what's rude.
Hiding that behind "I'm just criticizing" (you didn't, but it's a popular refrain in such "debates") is more than only rude, it's also cowardice.
> You can't rationally say the maintainer is within his rights for rejecting security patches and then argue that critics are wrong for criticizing these practices.
The author of the package didn't force their code onto the users.
The authors of the criticism forced their criticism on him by throwing it his way in the form of bug reports etc. even when it was clear that there's no interest in it.
Unless the critics are engaging in threats, intimidation, and/or violence, we're talking about criticism and not force.
> Criticism isn't "force" or "attempted force". If you think criticism is rude, that's fine. Hypocritical, but fine.
No, the attempt to make somebody do what you want by brigading is what's attempting to exert force and what's rude.
> The author of the package didn't force their code onto the users.
No one is arguing this. Weird straw man.
> The authors of the criticism forced their criticism on him by throwing it his way in the form of bug reports etc. even when it was clear that there's no interest in it.
Wow. I really didn't anticipate the "bug reports == force" equivalence.
Re. "The author of the package didn't force their code onto the users," it's not really a straw man. People are arguing that the author has moral responsibility for their use of his code. That ignores the fact that they actively chose to use his code. The only way the author would be morally responsible for their use of his code is if he had forced them to use it somehow. So yes, people are basically arguing this.
But software done for free by volunteers carries no obligation of a legal or even a moral kind, whatsoever. This is completely different from selling software or doing work for hire or donations. There a moral and often even legal obligation exists.
What actix developer did was, to pardon my French, inexcusable. Deeming security patch boring? Making your own `Cell`, implementing it badly and misusing it, because it's faster on some stupid benchmark site?
If we designed cars like that, they would have no breaks, no gears and no cabin.
Honestly, I think it's better Rust abandons `actix` asap. Before it gets any real traction.
I do not know how the Rust community manages performance comparison, but the .NET bubble was broken by that page and resulted in awesome results for the platform.
PS: just pointing out what the page achieved somewhere else. The discussion about the maintainer and what happened there is a different topic.
But from what I heard, to get where it is, actix developer took some really bizzare shortcuts. E.g. hardcoding parts of response. On top of general unsafe usage.
I think the benchmarks are flawed, since they don't account for such "optimizations".
In .NET case they changed the language in response to the needs of the Techempower benchmark (and the Unity3d engine) to allow safe and performing ops. .NET also has the unsafe keyword for low level ops and is surely also used. The advantage of .NET is that it was a team with a central manager who pushed all areas, http framework, base class library and language into the same direction. A community like Rust does not have that privilege.
The patch was "boring", not substantial to claim copyright.
https://gist.github.com/pcr910303/d7722a26499d0e9d2f9034a06f...
Adding to this, you might still transitively depend on the upstream through your other deps in ways you can’t change without either forking all your deps... or getting them to switch.
And what does “getting the ecosystem to switch” look like? It looks a lot like complaining about the upstream, such that others in the community understand what the problem is that your fork is solving.
If you depend so much on that code, if the security of your software depends on someone else's free work, why don't you hire that person to fix the bugs?
If the community cares about security then should this happen:
> Sure, but once you’ve forked, now you have a fork only you use, but which you know is more secure than its upstream for reason X. That’s an unstable equilibrium—you want others to know of your fork, and to switch to it, so that other downstream projects can also be more secure.
The community would move onto your secure fork and the author of said fork would become a maintainer. As Dave Rand, the CTO of AboveNet used to say to newcomers who used to say 'X should be done!' -- "Thank you for volunteering - you are now in charge of X."
"Atrix-web should not use unsafe"
"Thank you for volunteering - you are now in charge of making atrix-web not using unsafe"
"Thank you for delegating responsibility of making atrix-web not use unsafe, to me. I accept responsibility for this piece, but you are still the leader of $PROJECT." <workworkwork> "Here is a PR that makes atrix-web less unsafe."
"I don't accept your PR."
Dave Rand's advice doesn't apply here, as several people picked up responsibility for making atrix-web less unsafe, put forth the work to do so, but were rejected. It's one thing for me as a user to feel entitled to everyone else doing what I think they should, while not putting in any effort, but IMO it's less clear cut when I'm putting my money when my mouth is, and submitting PRs.
Fork it, make it "atrix-web-safe", post about it on whatever rust announcement list/forum/group is and have people move to the "atrix-web-safe". That's leadership. The rest is moan-fest.
If you fork on GitHub, they take care of letting people know.
I've forked a few abandondedish projects, and other people seem to find the patches. The best example I can think of is stud, which the people behind Varnish adopted and renamed to hitch; they surveyed the landscape and took good patches from most of the forks.
I might not look for forks from a more active project, but it's definitely something I look for when I run into problems with software without a lot of recent updates.
Or you can pay the cost of bringing in changes from the upstream project. This happens a lot for commercial software. I remember having to maintain a “fork” of BEA’s WebLogic server for a year or two until they incorporated changes my employer needs.
It’s not so bad.
You publish your code to Github, you're part of a community. You make it open and allow for contributions and see people are using it, you should be clear about your level of give-a-shit.
Hell no. It that were the case, I'd never publish anything.
> You make it open and allow for contributions and see people are using it, you should be clear about your level of give-a-shit.
It is YOUR responsibility to see that for yourself by watching how the project is actually maintained.
Why do so many people insist on being aloof and unhelpful in communicating to users of their software? What is so hard about offering a modicum of context for what people can expect of you as a maintainer? It's so ideologically rigid and unreasonable.
Maybe. The main issue I see with github is that it's impossible to disable pull requests there. We have that issue in the coreboot project, which uses github as a read-only mirror.
Maybe we should just shut that down to make clear that coreboot is not part of the "GitHub community".
Those are demands. The toy project one is relatively low cost, but "he should have given reasons" brings with its lots of effort to do right - and then you get to do it over and over again, because the masses can fling shit at you faster than you can reason about it.
critcism: the expression of disapproval of someone or something based on perceived faults or mistakes.
"he should have ..." is clearly an expression of disapproval.
Of course he didn't, in the legal sense of the term. And then people didn't have to stop criticizing him, in the legal sense of the term.
And obviously for the ethical / moral point of view, people have vastly different opinions, otherwise there would not be this debate.