> a lot of what you said rests upon the notion that people were relying on these features.
They were, though. The blog post linked above, and several people in the Reddit thread linked in the blog post mentioned depending on these features.
We can disagree about whether it matters that a small percentage of people used them, but I would argue that even if a single person did, a rugpull is certainly a shitty experience for them. It also has a network effect, where if other people see that developers did that, they are likely to believe that something similar in the future can happen again. Once trust is lost, it's very difficult to gain it back.
> Second, its likely that even fewer of them contributed anything at all to the project in general, and those features in particular. What claim do they have to anything - especially when it was just freely given to them, and not actually taken away (the code is still there)?
I think this is a very hostile mentality to have as an OSS developer. Delaney himself expressed something similar in that Reddit thread[1]:
> I expect nothing from you and you in turn should expect nothing from me.
This is wrong on many levels.
When a software project is published, whether as open source or otherwise, a contract is established between developers and potential users. This is formalized by the chosen license, but even without it, there is an unwritten contract. At a fundamental level, it states that users can expect the software to do what it advertises to do. I.e. that it solves a particular problem or serves a particular purpose, which is the point of all software. In turn, at the very least, the developer can expect the project's existence to serve as an advertisement of their brand. Whether they decide to monetize this or not, there's a reason they decide to publish it in the first place. It could be to boost their portfolio, which can help them land jobs, or in other more direct ways.
So when that contract is broken, which for OSS typically happens by the developer, you can understand why users would be upset.
Furthermore, the idea that because users are allowed to use the software without any financial obligations they should have no functional expectations of the software is incredibly user hostile. It's akin to the proverb "don't look a gift horse in the mouth", which boils down to "I can make this project as shitty as I want to, and you can't say anything about it". At that point, if you don't care about listening to your users, why even bother releasing software? Why choose to preserve user freedoms on one hand, but on the other completely alienate and ignore them? It doesn't make sense.
As for your point about the code still being there, that may be technically true. But you're essentially asking users to stick with a specific version of the software that will be unmaintained moving forward, as you focus on the shiny new product (the one with the complete rewrite). That's unrealistic for many reasons.
> And to the extent that they can't or wont fix it themselves, what happens if the dev just says "im no longer maintaining datastar anymore"?
That's an entirely separate scenario. If a project is not maintained anymore, it can be archived, or maintenance picked up by someone else. Software can be considered functionally complete and require little maintenance, but in the fast moving world of web development, that is practically impossible. A web framework, no matter how simple, will break eventually, most likely in a matter of months.
> Finally, if they cant fix it themselves (especially when AI could almost certainly fix it rapidly), should they really be developing anything?
Are you serious? You expect people who want to build a web site and move on with their lives to dig into a foreign code base, and fix the web framework? It doesn't matter how simple or complex it is. The fact you think this is a valid argument, and additionally insult their capability is wild to me. Bringing up "AI" is laughable.
> Again, most of the furor is quite clearly performative.
Again, it's really not. A few people (that we know of) were directly impacted by this, and the network effect of that has tarnished the trust other people had in the project. Doubling down on this, ignoring and dismissing such feedback as "performative", can only further harm the project. Which is a shame, as I truly do want it to gain traction, even if that is not the authors' goal.
Anyway, I wish you and the authors well. Your intentions seem to come from the right place, but I think this entire thing is a misstep.
[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/datastardev/comments/1lxhdp9/though...