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Comment by IshKebab | Hacker News Reader

There's a way to do all that without being an arsehole.

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.

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> Also putting an open source project out there doesn't absolve you of all social obligations simply because it's free.

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 don't. Not morally anyway. By sharing it he's ensuring that no other less toxic projects can flourish (at least not as easily). That comes with some moral obligation not to be a complete dick.

putting an open source project out there doesn’t entail _any_ social obligations actually.

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

> putting an open source project out there doesn’t entail _any_ social obligations actually.

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.

I get where you’re coming from.

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.

Actually there is a big understanding of how this all came to be. You are all just too new to currently grasp it.

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

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