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Comment by mbreese | Hacker News Reader

Then you cancel the sponsorships to the project and notify the supporters. When the maintainer effectively cancels the project, this makes sense. But you don’t migrate supporters automatically over to a brand new project (even if it is the most stable fork of the original).

> 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.

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> but you are relying on people (who were never aware of the switch and the new fork) being okay with this, without their consent.

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.

Does it matter what Open Collective thinks if most people believe this is immoral?

Define "most" people....

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 have to let the supporters make that decision.

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.

I don't see how it's immoral. If someone wants to sponsor Marak personally, they can do so easily. If people are donating to the project under the false belief that the money is exclusively going to Marak, then that's their problem for misreading the details of what they were donating to.

I don’t think most people think it’s immoral. I think most people think it’s ‘questionable, but probably practically the best choice’.

But they are changing the “project”. Just because the new project is named “Faker-JS” doesn’t make it “official”.

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, not for a specific person.

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.

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