I still think that hijacking the mkdocs package was the wrong way to go though.
The foss landscape has become way too much fork-phobic.
Just fork mkdocs and go over your merry way.
I don’t think that’s the case. It’s more of a marketing/market incentive. It’s great pr to be associated with the most famous project, way less so to be associated with a fork, at least until the fork becomes widespread and well recognised.
GitHub does make it fairly easy to fork a project, I wouldn’t blame the situation on github.
yeah i'm gonna call BS on this. this kind of drama already existed when communities were "decentralised" and each one had its own forum, mailing list or whatever.
the core of the issue here is about wanting to be the owner of a repository.
so people should just not bother with being owner of a specific repository, but just fork it and move on. and github supports forking sufficiently well for this purpose.
1. Issues, PRs, discussions etc don't move over,
2. Discovery. When GitHub was in its infancy they made a big deal out of the "network" feature. Almost 20 years later it has languished, virtually unchanged in that entire time. When I think of decentralisation I think Bitcoin. We need a better way to "discover" the consensus fork. I feel like GitHub could do a lot to help, but they don't care.
- lovelydinosaur,
- Mia Kimberly Christie
- Kim (Christie)
- Tom Christie
[1] https://github.com/orgs/encode/discussions/11#discussioncomm...
Pretty sure those are completely standard for major changes in maintainers/hostile forks/acknowledging major contributors. I've seen a lot of abandoned MIT/BSD projects add a new line for forks/maintainers being active again in order to acknowledge that the project is currently being headed by someone else.
From my "I am not a lawyer" view, Kludex is basically correct, although I suppose to do it "properly", he might need to just duplicate the license text in order to make it clear both contributors licensed under BSD 3-clause. Probably unnecessary though, given it's not a license switch (you see that style more for ie. switching from MIT to BSD or from MIT/BSD to GPL, since that's a more substantial change); the intent of the license remains the same regardless and it's hard to imagine anyone would get confused.
I suspect (given the hammering on it in responses), that Kludex asking ChatGPT if it was correct is what actually pissed off the original developer, rather than the addition of Kludex to the list in and of itself.
The original author said they were “the license holder”, specifically with a “the”, in discussions around both Starlette and MkDocs, which yes, just isn’t true even after rounding the phrase to the nearest meaningful, “the copyright holder”. This appears to be an honest misconception of theirs, so, not the end of the world, except they seem to be failing at communication hard enough to not realize they might be wrong to begin with.
Note though that with respect to Starlette this ended up being essentially a (successful and by all appearances not intentionally hostile?) project takeover, so the emotional weight of the drama should be measured with respect to that, not just an additional copyright line.
Mia Kimberly Christie seems like dangerous person.