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Comment by melony | Hacker News Reader

That's fine, but then the downstream shouldn't complain either when the code breaks, whether intentionally or unintentionally. The contract on paper disclaims all liability after all. There is a social contract and then there is the literal contract. A lot of commenters here seem to be willfully obtuse or simply ignoring the former.

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It still doesn't mean you can't call the guy out for being an asshole. However, that's the only relief you'll get in matters such as these. Other avenues would be to tweet about it and make it known that this is what you can expect from the same guy in the future so avoid him for future work as he won't be acting like an adult.

That also does not mean you cant call out the corporations that are leaching off open source...

I find it ironic that people are more upset at this guy for complaining about corporations, than they are about the corporations leaching...

the dev and hacker communities have really gone full on #HailCorporate haven't they. Where did my anti-establishment Libre community of the 90's go... I long for the good old days

We're not upset at the guy for complaining about corporations. We're upset at him for pulling a stunt that may have hurt some large corporations, but mostly just caught a lot of small projects in the crossfire.

Watching people piss into the wind is fun until you get some on your shoes.

He is leeching off a "corpo" by hosting his library on a "corpo" site.

There's a difference between stopping to give away your stuff for free and acting maliciously.

If I give away donuts for free and stop at some point, you have no right to complain. If I poison the donuts because you should've really thrown money at me for those donuts that I explicitly marked as free, I think you could complain after all.

If someone was offering free donuts with a sign that looked anything like the MIT license, you would be a fool to eat them.

If you don't take food as an example, see it like this: If I gift you a hammer, MIT disclaimer and all, you should not complain if it does not work or falls apart on the first few uses. Totally fine.

If I rig the hammer with a grenade in the head, so that it will violently explode the first time you use it - do you still think this is covered under the terms of the MIT license?

I agree with you, but I think this case is more like one day you go to borrow the hammer and it "falls apart" (the library is useless as it enters an infinite loop). A grenade would be an 'rm -rf', or trying to steal your user's data, which they could have done, and would have crossed a line.

My parents always taught me not to take donuts from unknown people, especially when they're free. It's common sense and corpos take all fault for taking an easy fix to save their own developer hours at someone's else expense. Now, when it turns out there are consequences to this, corpos aren't that happy.

With that argument, you might as well say that open-source/free software shouldn't exist.

My argument is that you shouldn't automatically trust it just because it's free. You shouldn't rely your entire infrastructure, and, perhaps, life, on it. If you do, there is no one at fault but you, because you passed all the responsibility to someone you have no control over. You are not entitled to protection and safety from the side of developer just because you said you rely on them - they are not going to carry your burden when it's not their job to do so.

Either you stay cautious, in which case you maintain your own forks for your own business or reinvent the wheel, so you don't rely on others that much, or you admit that you can't just reject this dependency - in which case it becomes either a public infrastructure, or a "donut business" on its own, and both should be financed as such. Take Linux as example, Linux is backed up by corporations and financing because everyone understands how crucial Linux is for our living. People took all the necessary steps to guarantee that kernel dev team is not going to disappear at any moment.

This is not the first and not the last time this happened. For some reason people think that open-source devs owe them something just because they had the right to bring their projects into existence. Javascript environment especially suffers from it because of unknown obsession of people to depend on packages which contain 1-2 lines of code at best, packages that can disappear at any moment.

Faker dev acted maliciously, but no one could guarantee that he wouldn't. No one was there to care about his mental state, or his wallet contents, and only relatively small companies and few people donated to his project, something he worked on for over a decade.

Sure, you can blame him all the way you want, but that won't undo the damage. If you rely on something maintained by an individual, you have to take into account that this individual is an actual human, this human actually exists and like any other human he is a subject of free will and uncertain futures, and whatever risks come with it. If you don't, this is what happens to you.

I have no contention with the argument for due diligence and self-preservation. It's your comparison of OSS with potentially poisoned donuts that strikes me as the same facile arguments made by the Not Invented Here types. It's one thing say your infrastructure is your problem. It's another to suggest that anything free as in free beer is ipso facto too good to be true. That's an unsubstantiated reductionist take.

The linux kernel was not always as well-financed as it has become. Before it's recent about-face, Microsoft financed attempts to stifle Linux. Linux's continued existence has rested always on the merit of its utility, whether to hobbyists or to corporations.

The Faker dev may not owe the rest of the world anything, just as the world doesn't owe anything to him. But what about those who have payed or contributed to his work? Are you of the view the anyone who sincerely their money, time, and intellectual output into Faker deserved to be suckered? Those people are human beings too. They deserve something for their investments rather than being used as unwitting pawns for someone's mental breakdown-induced prank.

Taking your view of security to its natural conclusion, no person should use a computer if he/she didn't bake the silicon wafer himself/herself. Otherwise he/she shouldn't complain if he/she becomes a victim of fraud or misrepresentation.

> That's fine, but then the downstream shouldn't complain either when the code breaks, whether intentionally or unintentionally.

There's no contract that says complaining is banned.

That's the point. If the dev complaints are invalid because the contract doesn't say so, then the downstream complaints should also be invalid.

Except the license does say so

The license does say what?

The license doesn't say any payment is necessary.

The license doesn't say new versions will still work.

The license doesn't say anything about complaints.

If it's valid to complain about code breaking, it should also be valid to complain about lack of payment. These complaints are outside of the legal mandates of the license.

It isn't valid to complain about the code breaking. At least not with any consequences. Because the license explicitly says that the software is provided without warranty.

Likewise, the license explicitly says that the software is provided for free, therefore it isn't valid to complain about people not paying for it.

Nobody's on the side of the big corps here, but "why aren't you paying for this thing that I've given to everyone explicitly for free" seems nonsensical.

But plenty of people are complaining about the code breaking.

I think both complaints are valid. Being legal and being beyond complaint are very different. "explicitly for free" is the legal contract, and it's okay to have norms that extend beyond that.

> Nobody's on the side of the big corps here

The point is, people apply legal logic to the payment and moral logic to breaking the code.

You can either agree that this guy is an asshole but these companies totally deserved it for leeching off his work, or you can say that they're both in their right according to the license.

But the argument that "he's an asshole because these companies had no obligation to pay him" is extremely dumb and hypocritical, and that's what many people are saying.

No, I apply legal to both. Payment is not required and breaking it intentionally to do harm is illegal. Intent matters.

Taking the disclaimer in the MIT license for example:

> THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

This makes it pretty clear: The author is NOT liable.

The license says the code is "AS IS".

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