You can spin it however you like, but renaming the real one "fakerjs-legacy" and appropriating all sponsors is a scumbag move.
> During the conversation with Ben, he went over the terms and conditions of the Open Collective with me.
> Ben said that simply, "The funding is attached to the project, not the current maintainer."
None of Marak's personal GitHub sponsors were changed (obviously).
To be clear: Marak deleted the original project as part of his protest. The sponsors in question are donating money to sponsor the project, not a single person. It wouldn't make sense to send their money to someone who deleted the project.
This new fakerjs isn't the old project, technically or practically speaking (technically being the important part here).
So funding attached to the old project should be still attached to that now-abandoned fakerjs, or straightly up canceled if Open Collective considers it violates their terms, instead of transferring.
The fact they can't do it themselves and asked Open Collective's exclusive director to do it "manually" basically self-confirmed it shouldn't be done.
No, it's definitely a continuation of the old project.
Marak deleted the old project. It's now just a non-functional GitHub repo with a Readme that says "What really happened with Aaron Swartz?". Nobody would consider that to be more like the original fakerjs than this active fork that, literally, retains the original fakerjs.
> So funding attached to the old project should be still attached to that now-abandoned fakerjs
Not just abandoned. It's deleted. Or at least rendered useless, devoid of history, and non-functional.
Why would they continue funneling money to that? Why would they not give money to the actual project as it continues?
What I don't agree is to transfer its sponsors to an account that has zero relationship with original account.
Marak's GitHub sponsors aren't changed. If people wanted to specifically sponsor Marak, they would have chosen to do it there. The Open Collective is very specifically about the project, not a specific person.
> What I don't agree is to transfer its sponsors to an account that has zero relationship with original account.
The current fakerjs has more of a relationships with the original code than what's in Marak's repo.
I don't see the issue. The Open Collective is specifically about sponsoring the project, which Marak clearly and publicly washed his hands of.
Again, they weren't sponsoring Marak. They were sponsoring the project. The project is still going.
> We came to the determination that users unfamiliar with the whole Faker situation wouldn't know that the repository's sponsorship links aren't funding the continued development of the project.
If the intent of the supporters was to support the project, then you can ask them to continue funding the new fork. But you don’t just move funding by default. Cancelling the ongoing support would be fine, but you are relying on people (who were never aware of the switch and the new fork) being okay with this, without their consent.
This is a messy situation, but you can’t make these decisions unilaterally. Inform the supporters and let them decide.
Open Collective makes it clear that the sponsorship is for the project, not for a specific person.
It's not "without their consent". It's literally the terms of the Open Collective.
To me, this is like the left-pad incident and npm. There was a vocal minority who denounced npm for looking after the greater good, maintaining continuity and transferring the project to someone else.
In this case, since the author also deleted the project, the proper way to maintain continuity for the sponsors seems to transfer it to the new community of folks who are interested in maintaining the project. Sponsoring the old deleted project does nobody any good.
Personally, I don't see anything wrong with what OC did.
You can make that decision easy, you can automate a lot of it, you can inform, but you can’t change which project the funding is going to without explicit consent.
And yes, for these purposes, the new fork should be considered a new project. It is a completely different situation than if the project itself decided to change maintainers, etc.
This is really a crazy situation where the original maintainer blows up the project. The best scenario would be for the original authors to hand over the project in some capacity. But that seems pretty unlikely.
To put it in different terms… this was not a SQL UPDATE. The was a DELETE. You don’t just change foreign keys to a different project_id when you delete a record.
I would also argue that the author was completely irresponsible, and made life difficult for everyone that used and supported the project. But that’s a separate issue and doesn’t make what the open collective decided right.
Does the open collective have the ability to decide who is in charge of a project? Can they remove maintainers?
Let’s say there is a fork of a different popular project. Are you suggesting that they could they unilaterally decide to support the fork over the original project? However unlikely that is, I don’t think they have that power. Decertifying a project? Sure. Redirecting funding to a new project (even a fork), just isn’t right.
The project no longer exists. It was deleted. These people forking it does not give them the ownership of the project. The problem in the supply chain was solved by NPM rolling back the version. Github temporarily suspending his account could be attributed to suspicious behavior. These guys commandeering someone else's open collective and general community identity (hn handle, twitter handle, library name) does not solve any actual problem, and is clearly just an opportunistic way to boost their own standing in the community and financially gain off someone else possibly having a breakdown. Shameless and very unethical.
If I make a donation to a charity which I trust, and some third party simply takes the money and hands it over to some other charity instead, claiming that it doesn't matter because the goal is the same, I'd be rightfully outraged. How is this different?