Simplewall Has Been Discontinued
github.com
github.com
Can speculate all day of course, and any reason is a good one. Again, I know they don't owe us anything, even an explanation, but curiosity always gets the best of me.
People can create and operate channels on YouTube for free. Yet we frequently see reports of Google acting unreasonably towards people who come to depend on YouTube, often for their livelihood. We expect Google to act morally by providing the bare minimum of human oversight when a person's channel has been banned by an AI mistake. But there is no legal or ethical obligation, because YouTube is "free", and Google just doesn't care enough about morals.
We also see lots of examples of FOSS authors getting burned out when their sense of morality is used and abused by users. That's also not okay. But perhaps we can aim for a happy medium where the "norm" assumes people can be reasonable, mature adults. No one wins when we optimize for the outliers.
> But perhaps we can aim for a happy medium
Unfortunately, there is a vicious cycle leading to extreme attitudes from both sides, which I described in the second half of this comment: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38301710#38310514>
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
> Dead posts aren't displayed by default, but you can see them all by turning on 'showdead' in your profile.
> If you see a [dead] post that shouldn't be dead, you can vouch for it. Click on its timestamp to go to its page, then click 'vouch' at the top. When enough users do this, the post is restored. There's a small karma threshold before vouch links appear.
I'm not sure if your karma is sufficient for that action, but it's not a dead comment anymore.
FOSS often times consumers are profiting and maintainers are not (and many times maintainers are investing/spending instead)
I would argue that they do, in fact, owe us something.
All people who make public announcements are in effect holding a conversation with the public, until such time as they publicly announce its end. A person in a conversation is socially obligated to make reasonable attempts to speak and respond to other people’s questions, comments, and concerns. If they don’t, or suddenly stop, they have abandoned the social etiquette of a conversation. This is not the public “being entitled” (as some like to claim), but is instead the quite reasonable expectations of the public who was led into a conversation with somebody who did not, or ceased to, respect the social rules.
(I should not need to say this, but in addition to being a user of many software projects, I am myself a maintainer of software publicly available – in official Linux distributions, even. I do not think that I ask my fellow maintainers for much – only a smidgen of respect for their users.)
(Previously: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38301710#38304918>, <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22073908#22074287>)
No, they're not. Unlike a conversation, a public announcement is a one-way, one-to-many communication.
> A person in a conversation is socially obligated to make reasonable attempts to speak and respond to other people’s questions, comments, and concerns.
In a social setting, with a limited number of participants, sure. But in an internet forum, with an unlimited number of participants, people fail to make reasonable attempts to respond to the entirety of others' comments on a fairly regular basis. And there is absolutely no widespread social obligation otherwise.
But this is all entirely irrelevant anyway, because a software project is not the same thing as a conversation in the first place:
> the quite reasonable expectations of the public who was led into a conversation with somebody who did not, or ceased to, respect the social rules.
Using someone's free software is quite clearly not even remotely the same thing as being "led into a conversation", so there's no reason to expect the same social obligations.
You are mischaracterizing what I wrote. I did not say the entirety of others’s comments; I explicitly wrote only “make reasonable attempts”.
> Using someone's free software is quite clearly not even remotely the same thing as being "led into a conversation", so there's no reason to expect the same social obligations.
Users are still completely reasonable in expecting something. Consider my hypothetical situation I described in the second paragraph here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38310060>.
OK, but that's still clearly not the widespread social norm in internet forums. For better or worse, it's quite common for commenters to not make any reasonable attempt to respond to sub-threads.
> Users are still completely reasonable in expecting something. Consider my hypothetical situation
I completely disagree. Your hypothetical situation sounds absolutely like entitlement to me.
Do you mean to say that you think that it would be completely socially acceptable for a maintainer to act as in my hypothetical exaggerated hyperbolic situation? Would you respect anyone who actually did that? Would you remain friends with anyone who did that? Really?
As for respecting someone who responded in that specific wording, no, it's unprofessional. But that's orthogonal to whether or not it's entitlement to expect a regular release cadence from a FOSS project that you have no commercial relationship with.
As for remaining friends, likewise, that's orthogonal to the topic being discussed.
It is entirely reasonable for users to expect maintainers to behave respectably. Users may not have any legal rights to be treated professionally, but it does not change the reasonableness of the expectation.
> But that's orthogonal
It is not orthogonal. We are not discussing any legal rights; we are only discussing what is socially acceptable behavior from maintainers.
Nor have I mentioned legal rights in my responses. By entirely in their rights, I meant in terms of social norms and expectations, not legally. (That should be obvious, since the maintainer is not a slave, and free society always legally permits people to stop doing unpaid work and hobbies.)
Between multiple subthreads here, several commenters are telling you that your expectations are tantamount to entitlement, and you just don't want to hear it. I'm not going to continue replying to you.
Normally such activity comes with one year commitments. Leaving in the middle of things unannounced and without warning would be breaking the social etiquette. No one is forced to work but there are social expectations and obligations in social activities. How much open source project is similar to such activity, and how much social expectation there are will depend on the context. For example, if you are volunteering as treasurer to a large open source project, the expectations are going to be very similar to that of a club, as will the burn out if the person doing the work don't get value from it.
That social etiquette indicates that maintainers don't owe you shit.
Also, and this might be hard for overly rules-obsessed people to understand, this is not a legal matter. It is a matter of social etiquette. I of course agree that nobody is legally owed anything. But this is not about legality.
Actually, if you re-read the GP, all of those points are covered. You just don't like the answer.
Slaves and servants and subjects have the obligation you describe.
It is the nature of their bondage.
Asking questions and complaining and unsolicited opining are hallmarks privilege.
To the extent a social contract is a contract, it requires both parties to receive consideration.
If people don’t want the social burden of being a public person or even the relatively small burden of having a public project, they have the option of not being public.
You are conflating legal rights with what is socially or ethically right, and I think this is a dubious rhetorical trick.
I'm well aware of the difference between between the two concepts. What I, along with basically everyone else in this thread, is telling you is that this social obligation on the part of open source maintainers you seem the believe in is not a thing. People who give away their software for free do not owe any debt to anyone who might choose to use that software. As I said to the 1 (one) other person who seems to agree with you here, the relevant social etiquette is "don't look a gift horse in the mouth."
Fair; I have edited.
> this social obligation on the part of open source maintainers you seem the believe in is not a thing.
Many people do think it’s a thing, though. See my links to past threads, where I am far from alone in my opinion. See also various Linux Distributions’ rules for maintainers.
Against my better judgement, I read through the first thread you linked to.
If there are any substantial number of people writing there that agree with your position that open source maintainers have a "social obligation" -- or anything similar -- to the users of the software they give away for free, I missed it.
Most of the replies to your comments I saw there were people trying to explain the same things we are trying to convey here, followed by your steadfast refusal to deal with reality. I mean, at one point you responded to a quoted section of an MIT-style license and said:
> That text does not disclaim support, security bugfixes, and future development. On the contrary, all three of those things are probably either heavlily implied or outright stated to be available on the project web site.
... when the first two lines of the quoted license does exactly that. To wit:
> ... PROVIDE THE PROGRAM "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND ...
... which means the copyright holders disclaim support, bug fixes, and future development. That's literally what providing something "AS IS" means. It is provided as it currently is.
I don't think continuing to engage with you here on an even more nebulous concept ('social obligation') when you are unable or unwilling to objectively deal with written text is going to be a good use of my time. Have a nice day.
I don't know what I can say for "why" other than go find a manners book and a philosophy book.
If the only two options are to become obligated to the public or not to engage at all, what a sad world this would be. Thankfully, there are many, many alternate options in the reality we share, even if not in your imagined reality.
But you are actually arguing for something different. You are insisting on an implication where the rest of us don't see one. If a project has nice documentation, an up-to-date license, etc. you believe that there is ethical/moral implication that the maintainer will fulfil some responsibility.
This isn't just about misrepresentation (which is almost a side-effect), it is about a proposed belief in duty, almost like a chivalry that goes beyond gentleman-ness.
I tend to think of Postel's law in those circumstances, liberal in what I accept and conservative in what I do. I've heard it said that the happiest cultures of the world have low expectations.
If he keeps pushing commits, I won’t place bets but would say don’t be surprised if they’re in a new language.
I would think it’s fairly simple. Announce your retirement from the project, and assign the project leadership and commit rights (or whatever GitHub uses) to whoever you feel would be a good fit, or the most frequent contributor, or simply to the most recent one. But most anything would be better than locking the repository and vanishing without a word.
This smells like a “nobody appreciates how much I’ve been carrying this project” situation. That complicates things.
Like I said, anyone would be better than nobody.
If a maintainer doesn't want to continue a project, and there's no existing contributor who has demonstrated both the qualifications and interest in taking over a project, the responsible thing to do is archive it – not give committer rights to some rando.
In the future, if someone else wants to take a stab at continuing the project, they can fork it. Crucially that moves the project to a different namespace – as it absolutely should, for security reasons.
But unfortunately you have to disable core isolation for the time being https://github.com/tnodir/fort/discussions/108
Fort worked perfectly, it had more settings and once you took the time to set it up you could just save the rules, the configuration and export it to another computer.
MS did indicate during the CrowdStrike DOS that they would work towards opening up or at least documenting those APIs and some other aspects of the kernel to help improve the situation for vendors.
I believe there might have also been antitrust concerns about the way they deliver Defender as part of the OS, but simultaneously offer premium cloud platforms? Don’t recall the full story.
I would hate to need to look for a replacement.
I'm already running Tiny11 + Win11Debloat, which removes some of it.
But windows will always introduce more telemetry tracking and Recall. If you want to have privacy and not be surveilled by Microsoft/Windows, use Linux.
You need to take a bit of time to configure what you want it to do, then run it on every computer you configure.
Not saying you should switch. That’s a personal decision. But it might be time to take a look at what else is out there.