The main developer is toxic af, and the community behavior reflects that.
To summarize and paraphrase: the project is his personal garden. It's by him, for him. But he has also decided to open that garden to any random stranger on the internet, free of charge. In a lot of similar projects, that means an invitation is extended to plant stuff in the garden or to suggest that certain plants are moved. He wants to make it clear that that's not the case in his garden. If you wanna plant, you're free to freely and instantly duplicate his garden and get cracking. But he will not be planting your plants in his.
Since people struggle to accept this, he's taken on a harsher-than-normal tone. That's understandable to me.
Sounds more like a fetish basement than a garden to me.
I recently set up my first Valetudo robot, and therefore thoroughly read the documentation multiple times. In it, he comes across as genuinely wanting to help people succeed running Valetudo. I assume that's the reason for the group chat. At the same time, he also very very much does not want to give people the illusion that they can demand anything from him. The fear that people will is not unfounded. Think of what happens in any moderately popular FOSS project. He's just opting out of all that, in no uncertain terms.
> Sounds more like a fetish basement than a garden to me.
Fine. So he's made a fetish basement, and he's letting others use it for free. He wants to make sure that nobody demands, or even suggests, he change his basement to accommodate their fetishes.
Happy?
Also putting an open source project out there doesn't absolve you of all social obligations simply because it's free. You can't say "well you are free to not use it, then it doesn't affect you at all" because that isn't true. By making and publicising this project he is actively discouraging other similar projects from happening - ones that might have less toxic leaders.
I should write a blog post about that because it seems to be an extremely common misconception.
If I understand the guy correctly, he doesn't think that sharing software that he wrote comes with any obligations once he's sufficiently informed the recipients about damage it may cause. I agree with him.
I can imagine the author took abuse from some extremely entitled people for some time and then just snapped.
If you ever ran any moderately successful oss project you get dozens of these people all the time; they demand your time, work, and attention and screech, complain, and blackmail you if you don’t instantly succumb to their demands.
It’s the one thing that always turned me off from doing oss more seriously; users are just the worst.
Of course only a small fraction of users but if you have many users it’s a never ending flood
I disagree with that though. See my other comments.
> If you ever ran any moderately successful oss project
I do (if 600 stars counts, which I'm sure you'll tell me it doesn't). We don't get people like that, and from the sounds of it none of the people who have been instantly banned have been like that either.
Although if the project is so toxic and horrible to interact with - wouldn’t people look for a more wholesome project?
I don’t agree that the toxic project would stifle growth for other less toxic projects solely by existing. If it’s that bad then it shouldn’t be that much more popular?
Besides what is stopping people from forking and building a less toxic community?
What irks me mostly about these complaints is exactly that: a whole lot of complaining and handwringing going on and very little action to improve the situation or even trying to understand how it came to be.
Also most of the people with big interest to fork are banned from the GitHub, which blocks direct forks, and this makes it much more difficult to rebase the source after change to the main
The problem is being verbally abusive towards people with no ill intent of any kind is unacceptable in ALL circumstances. No exceptions. You can refuse requests and ban whoever from your chatroom, that is his right.
You don't get the right to abuse and mock and harass people. Ever. Assuming that you do makes you a toxic asshole.
It's all very cut and dry. There's not really a gray area here. You either treat people with dignity or you're an asshole. Insisting that this kind of behavior is ever acceptable or excusable just means that you're also an asshole and looking for ways to rationalize and justify your own behavior.
I don’t think you need to treat people with dignity that don’t treat you with dignity.
There is - as always - a bunch of grey area.
You don’t need to be tolerant towards people that don’t practice tolerance themselves.
Doing so would untermine the whole basis that allows you to be tolerant.
I don’t know anything about this particular case though
If you put out a sign "come listen to my music" and then throw out every second person, everyone wearing blue and every blonde with no warning, that is toxic. It is your play, but you are not treating people coming in with respect. My 2c.
When you publish an OSS project, it is an implicit invitation for collaboration, and for being part of a community around shared interests where everyone benefits. That is the entire point of F/LOSS.
Yet I've heard many people, on here, in fact, arguing against that idea. That publishing free software but not accepting feedback, contributions, or providing support, still counts as OSS. And, technically, that may be the case if you consider OSS to only be about the license itself. If you take license terms like "THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND" as the only literal definition of what OSS is. When, in fact, it is, and can be, so much more than that.
People who think like this are doing themselves and their software a disservice. Software is better when it is worked on as a community effort, much like a garden. An individual might have good ideas, and be able to execute them well, but they're not omniscient nor omnipotent.
If Linus Torvalds had published Linux as his "personal garden", it would have never been even remotely as good and popular as it is today. It would have probably been another niche project in the footnotes of history.
There is no one single "entire point of F/LOSS". Even in the struggle to name it (free software vs open source software), the desire and intent is obviously different.
Sometimes people build something and publish it because they are OK if someone else makes something else out of it, extends it or whatever... But they don't want to be bothered about it anymore.
Running a community around a free software project indicates desire to collaborate on something, but even that does not indicate a desire to collaborate on everything this project could become (imagine someone coming in with a desire to port it to robot mowers — sure, it sounds related, but the author might not have any interest in it if they are living in an apartment, and they don't want to spread their limited time and energy on maintaining something they will never be able to test/support themselves).
I understand that. My argument is that that mentality is doing the project a disservice. For every person the author might find difficult to collaborate with, there will be many others who will contribute positive input and changes to the project. By not being open to collaboration, someone else will step in and build that community instead, given that the software is actually good. And that's fine, it's their prerogative, but chances are that their closed-but-technically-open project will languish in comparison to the project that's actually open and invites collaboration.
So, really, I don't see what they gain from releasing it as open source in the first place. Personal satisfaction from thinking they're helping others by providing code only? Building their personal portfolio or brand? For demonstration purposes? I honestly find it puzzling.
> Running a community around a free software project indicates desire to collaborate on something, but even that does not indicate a desire to collaborate on everything this project could become
And that's fine as well. No project will satisfy the use cases of everyone. The line has to be drawn at some point, and this should be made clear. Upstream code contributions often add additional maintenance burden to core developers, since the contributor will likely disappear once their code is merged. Forking is always an option when visions don't align. I get all that.
But it's one thing to have a clear focus for the project, and another to make it completely closed to contributions. Or to have this confusing in-between state where you have a website to promote the project, provide user documentation and places for community discussion, but then alienate your users by being hostile, not open to feedback, etc. It sends mixed signals to anyone interested in the project and willing to give their time and energy to improve it.
This is why I strongly believe that OSS only works when there is an environment of mutual good will, respect, and collaboration that allows a community to thrive. This is not encoded in any legal frameworks or licenses because it doesn't need to be. It should be common sense that the alternatives lead to everything OSS is opposed to: less freedoms for users, and proprietary software that benefits only a select few.
In the world where we accept unfinished software all around us, from government and banking services, to our daily general computing devices like computers and phones, to appliances like TVs, washing machines or elevators, the project seems to be doing great for many a user: we've heard accounts here from people putting the software on their device once years ago and forgetting about it — it just works.
Their focus seems to be exactly that: ensure this project works for them, and allow a select few trusted partners to make it work for their own equipment too. But work it must.
I might have a different perspective on making software and evolving it, but that does not make this perspective any less valuable — it's actually great to have it out there in the world.
> For every person the author might find difficult to collaborate with, there will be many others who will contribute positive input and changes to the project. By not being open to collaboration, someone else will step in and build that community instead, given that the software is actually good. And that's fine, it's their prerogative, but chances are that their closed-but-technically-open project will languish in comparison to the project that's actually open and invites collaboration.
The project has been there for years now, and this hasn't happened. Either there aren't "many" who'd "contribute positive input and changes", or the issues with the project management aren't as big as some are making it seem here.
> So, really, I don't see what they gain from releasing it as open source in the first place.
They don't have to gain anything: they publish it because they don't mind it, not looking for any gain.
> This is not encoded in any legal frameworks or licenses...
Many companies have nothing to lose if they released their IoT device firmware as open source, but they have nothing to gain either, so they don't do it. I'd much prefer it if they released it, even if for the most part, I wouldn't touch it.
But I'd feel the sense of trust that this device is never dying on me, even if a company does.
So I disagree: a free software license is enough to "encode" all that you seek! Just by having access to the source code, and rights to modify and distribute it, anyone can decide to build a different community, evolve a product in a different direction, or change it to have a new technical foundation.
When this need becomes strong enough, it will simply happen: for better or for worse. See eg. LibreOffice vs OpenOffice case. Or the cdrtools maintainer frustration with Debian/Ubuntu forks (https://cdrtools.sourceforge.net/private/linux-dist.html).
That's ok. It's ok to be different. I'm probably more like you for my own projects, but that doesn't invalidate this guy's stance.
> When you publish an OSS project, it is an implicit invitation for collaboration, and for being part of a community around shared interests where everyone benefits.
It is not.
> That is the entire point of F/LOSS.
If it were, don't you think that part would be written into at least one popular FLOSS license?
> People who think like this are doing themselves and their software a disservice. Software is better when it is worked on as a community effort, much like a garden. An individual might have good ideas, and be able to execute them well, but they're not omniscient nor omnipotent.
Who are you to decide for another person? Can I decide such things about your actual garden?
> If Linus Torvalds had published Linux as his "personal garden", it would have never been even remotely as good and popular as it is today. It would have probably been another niche project in the footnotes of history.
I'm glad he didn't. But if he had, do you really think that shaming or pressuring him into doing it differently would have in any way made him feel like continuing? Linux would have died.
Once you make something public it's not a private garden anymore.
So, you wanna shame or force him into accepting contributions? That's ridiculous!
> Once you make something public it's not a private garden anymore.
Wait, are you saying if I have an actual garden that I myself own and maintain, and I let random people from the street come see it between noon and five every Sunday, it's no longer my private garsden? Then you and I are on different planets in this debate.
If you make a garden and then declare it a public garden then yes. If you want people to not step on your flowers you can tell them in a normal way. No need to shout around, belittle them, and ban them from your garden for a year....
He could have just kept his Project private if he doesn't want people to interact. Simple as that.
He didn't. He made a garden, declared it private, and set specific terms under which you and I and others can come enjoy it. Take it or leave it.
> No need to shout around, belittle them, and ban them from your garden for a year....
Then follow his rules, or don't go to his garden! He's offering you a free favor. Take it or leave it.
> He could have just kept his Project private if he doesn't want people to interact. Simple as that.
Of course he could have. However, I'm adamant that those of us who find Valetudo useful – i.e. find his garden beautiful – would be worse off for it. Why would you want the overall usefulness given to the world to decrease? What's the benefit? Not feeling annoyed that he won't let you help?
Would you still be so nice after doing it the ten thousandth time?