Comment by aspenmayer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aspenmayer | Hacker News Reader

Some context from a third party VCV Rack plugin developer:

> 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.

> It would be easier to continue my work if there existed a healthier fork to migrate to, but VCV has been trying to prevent forks both through legal and social means, so there’s no viable fork yet.

> There’s MiRack[0][1], 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, so it exists completely disconnected from the VCV community, despite offering a smaller selection of the same modules with mobile support, which is something the community really wanted badly. Being only for Apple devices makes it impractical for me to use, so moving my development to it isn’t an option, unfortunately, if it were on PC I might have done that.

https://aria.dog/barks/why-i-will-never-create-modules-for-v...

Discussed on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27032669

[0] https://mirack.app/

[1] https://github.com/miRackModular

I cam across Aria's complaints about their experience as a developer within the Rack ecosystem, and I was very disappointed to read it. It made me reevaluate what I thought about Rack and Andrew's handling of the project.

However, somebody then gave me a link to what is apparently one of the main threads [0] in which they and Andrew Belt's main developer "got into it", and after reading that I was much less certain about who was behaving badly here (if anyone).

[0] https://community.vcvrack.com/t/do-open-source-plugins-need-...

Regarding the MiRack fork ... I am not certain, but I suspect that this author acted in specific ways that upset Andrew. I talk regularly to the developer of Cardinal (mentioned below), which is another fork of Rack, and thus far, things between them and Andrew have remained reasonably cordial.

Certainly as the developer of another open source audio project, if someone behaved the way the MiRack developer seems to have done [1], I would likely seek to exclude them from our community too.

[1] I stress the seems because it really is not entirely clear what took place.

Thanks for that added context. I think it is a tricky situation but I guess the rights of the author would extend to them requesting that their name be removed from forks that they don’t agree with, including from the title. However, I don’t know if the author should be able to force you to change the title of a fork that they themselves didn’t make, whether they currently maintain the software or not. It is still accurate to say that it is a fork of a prior state of the project, even if it has since been modified. It gets into Ship of Theseus territory.

It's unfortunate that my article, that was only meant to reach fellow module developers after my messages were deleted from the VCV community, was Streisanded and misinterpreted like that.

Most of us who have quit have not quit due to one incident, but due to a pattern of behavior over months. The incident you are bringing up was just the last straw. And what you are linking to is only what remains of the incident, as posts are often deleted, and disagreeing with moderation goes against VCV's code of conduct. Please do not assume you can read the archives of any incident and see an honest account of the full chronology.

The last time my article showed up on HN, a few people complained that my "product announcement" was too long and confused. Had I known it'd be on HN, I would never have mentioned what I was up to, as I have nothing to sell. I operate in an entirely different way than HN startup culture. These are passion projects done on my own time, and passion is fickle. Writing about my experiences was in part about making my peace with half a year of lost creative drive about music hacking. The audience was meant to be the dozen of fellow third-party developers who were fed up with coping with hostility and impostor syndrome.

As I said earlier, I was very disappointed to read of your experience as a Rack module developer (not least of the reasons: I use your modules often!)

However, this is a bit of a problem:

> Please do not assume you can read the archives of any incident and see an honest account of the full chronology.

The fact that Belt's handling of the module developer community has gained some notoriety that cannot be evaluated by reading "the full chronology" makes it extremely hard for those of us not involved in the original exchanges to make any confident assessment of what has taken place.

At this point, to be honest, the reading around of various threads (edited as they may be) related to all this left me with this as my only conclusion: your own personal style and beliefs and andrew belt's are deeply incompatible and it is probably best for everyone that you've chosen other pathways (you seemed deeply and personally hurt, and I could pretty much guarantee that it would happen again). I felt sympathy for both of your positions (at least as far as I could read them), and saw them as mostly irreconcilable.

I'm open to having my mind changed in the future. Your experience has certainly made me wonder if and how often I ever acted in a similar way that you feel Belt did, within the community of Ardour developers. I can remember only one (recent) incident in which someone felt they deserved explicit recognition for their part in a process. I hope that's the extent of it.

Wow. Thank you for bringing perspective, I wasn't aware of Aria's work (which is absolutely incredible) and of what's happening behind the scenes of VCV. It's very disappointing as the product is amazing and lowers the barrier to entry to the eurorack ecosystem.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com