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> this is such a disrespectful move towards the huge amount of contributors who invested time and effort to learn the project and make it better.

What? How?

You contribute to projects run by others with the understanding that others run the project, is this not the default assumption others have too when contributing to FOSS?

Is it disrespectful if my proposed feature was merged, but then later was removed because the maintainer just didn't want the feature anymore? In my mind, pretty clear it wouldn't, I'm only a contributor after all, not the maintainer or the person running the project.

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> Is it disrespectful if my proposed feature was merged, but then later was removed because the maintainer just didn't want the feature anymore?

No, the big difference is that the described scenario does not require getting familiar with a new 1M LoC codebase written in a different language to be able to continue contributing to the project.

For who? What you say is true for everyone who doesn't know Rust (before Zig), and not true for everyone else, same as it always is been, for every single FOSS project out there.

So it's disrespectful because before you could contribute, but because of the direction of the project, you no longer can?

Does that also means it'd be disrespectful to make projects more complicated and complex, because maybe someone who contributed initially don't know these new concepts, so introducing those would require this individual to learn about those things?

All of this still sounds like entitlement to me. Open source literally isn't about you, let people run their projects as they so wish, them making choices they think are better isn't disrespectful to anyone else, you're not forced to having to contribute to any FOSS projects.

> For who? What you say is true for everyone who doesn't know Rust (before Zig), and not true for everyone else, same as it always is been, for every single FOSS project out there.

Even if you are fluent in rust, it is going to require significant efforts to contribute to a new 1M LoC codebase.

> Open source literally isn't about you, let people run their projects as they so wish, them making choices they think are better

This is so far from the reality. The power of open source is coming from the contributors. Contributors are the most valuable assets of an open source project - without them most of the free tools you use would be significantly worse - including bun. The reason my open source projects got somewhat successful is the community that formed around the projects. And, it is hard to create a community when you give contributors no chance to participate in the projects direction, especially in such a critical decision that has enormous consequences.

> Even if you are fluent in rust, it is going to require significant efforts to contribute to a new 1M LoC codebase.

Of course, but this is true for any project or any language, can hardly be disrespectful of me to chose Clojure just because you don't happen to know it? That sounds crazy to me.

> Contributors are the most valuable assets of an open source project

You're talking about something else. Open source is literally about "This code has a specific license that allows you to do X" where X and Y differs by the license. Contributors or not matters squat if some open source project is valuable or not.

Don't mix concerns here, you're talking about "open development" or something else, not specifically open source.

Sure it's hard to create a community and get contributors and what not. But a maintainer choosing a different language and people feel that being "disrespectful" instead of just "stupid" or "dumb"? No, give me a break, you run your projects your way, and let others run theirs that way, they're not made for you, they just happen to be available to you because someone was nice enough to make it so. Don't spoil that by acting so entitled about how they should maintain and develop their project.

> Of course, but this is true for any project or any language, can hardly be disrespectful of me to chose Clojure just because you don't happen to know it?

Nobody said that the problem is not knowing rust. The problem is changing the whole stack of a project overnight. This requires significant effort to get familiar with, even if a contributor have all the experience in the world with the new stack.

> Don't mix concerns here, you're talking about "open development"

Call it however you want, bun could not be the tool it is without its >800 contributors.

I think most maintainers would rather you not contribute to their project if your contribution comes with the idea in your head that you're now a stakeholder who has some share in the project's technical direction.

Of course they're a stakeholder. They've made an investment of time and effort, and they're hoping that it will pay off. The question is whether a maintainer will respect that.

If you want to maintain sole ownership of something that >800 people contributed to, that reflects on you. People will judge you. Most maintainers would feel obligated to concede some control. But LLMs have intentionally aimed to devalue programming, so this transition is totally consistent with the new ownership. And it may be wildly successful, because they've got an unlimited supply of tokens for the foreseeable future.

But I'd say the opposite: Most maintainers would feel blessed to have a lot of contributors so invested that they felt a need to have a say in the direction of the project.

> No, give me a break, you run your projects your way, and let others run theirs that way, they're not made for you, they just happen to be available to you because someone was nice enough to make it so. Don't spoil that by acting so entitled about how they should maintain and develop their project.

Well in this case Jarred and Bun can run their project their way, and since they're not made for me, they can just happen to be available to someone else like Claude code and they can stay in their happy read-only land.

> Don't spoil that by acting so entitled about how they should maintain and develop their project.

Are you sure you even understand what entitled means?

> Open source literally isn't about you, let people run their projects as they so wish, them making choices they think are better isn't disrespectful to anyone else, you're not forced to having to contribute to any FOSS projects.

Tell me you've never worked on any meaningful OSS project.

Good luck to Bun, if I was in any of its contributors list, and not on Anthropic's payroll, I'd say goodbye and never touch the project with a ten foot pole. And I say this as an honest feedback, save your "don't let the door hit you on the way out".

> You contribute to projects run by others with the understanding that others run the project, is this not the default assumption others have too when contributing to FOSS?

There are certain unspoken rules you don't break out of a of tradition of process and decorum — this decision broke that rule, overturning 5+ years of accrued experience and institutional memory, so I can understand why this might feel like a rugpull which would reasonably upset the average contributor.

These antics are acceptable in a BDFL project where the stakes are low, but try this in an actual major project with thousands of contributors and see how it goes.

I think the best case scenario I can think of is the microsoft typescript js->go conversion, whereas the bun zig->rust is probably the worst case.

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