https://medium.com/@tridge60/rsync-and-outrage-d9849599e5a0
(Disclosure: while I haven't talked with him in years, Tridge was my colleague and mentor for many years. I feel it is worth considering his view before joining a crusade)
I don't entirely understand what this is saying. People wouldn't have been outraged if only the tests had been updated and/or he pushed solely on master - but he pushed breaking changes onto the release branch(es) too. Breaking workflows that have worked for years is a prime way to get people irate, and then seeing "Claude" in the commits just pours gasoline onto the fire.
Rsync has many options: I can totally believe that fixing a bug in one place broke someone's usage, to be fair.
I think it's pretty sad that he even had to write it. Quite a lot of judgement from people who aren't paying his bills.
Also, since it's a separate entity, its lifetime is not tied to the owner. So if the owner dies, their shares are inherited by somebody else, and the company keeps operating.
It helps in raising money for business operations. A corporation raises capital by issuing and selling shares of stock. However, if a physical person did that, I think it would be called indentured servitude.
I was trying to show that it is not "merely a legal expedient", that corporate personhood had a specific purpose, and that it differed from a real person. I think that the confusion about legal personhood in corporations comes from how lawyers explain its existence. A couple of lawyers I've had explained it as, it's just like a person in the law, except where it's different.
The problem is that we haven't created a clear enough distinction between a natural person and a legal person. In many cases, corporations have rights but not the responsibility. For example, they have speech rights, but they don't go to jail when the corporation commits a crime. The judicial inequalities between ordinary people and rich people are even greater between natural persons and corporations.
A model that treats what effectively amounts to a body of assets united by a charter as equivalent to a person - except when it isn't - is inherently confusing because these are not at all similar kinds of entities. While it's clear that this model has a purpose, I think people are right to point out that the equivalence is drawn by rather stilted logic and even more right to question whether the consequences of this legal framing are desirable from their perspective
Are AIs?
When you quickly churn more lines of code in a few days than you changed in months, and then release them as a normal, not sure you're expecting "constructive criticism"
Also if I suspect the project is just slopping high amount of code without proper thought, I probably won't invest my time into reading those changes
I think he makes a lot of good points here, but also think that kind of statement is unlikely to assuage the real concerns of people using the software. I think people are more likely to fork rsync now rather than rely on a more diverged earlier alternative implementation though