Maintainership transfer of uBlock: post mortem | Hacker News Reader

Maintainership transfer of uBlock: post mortem

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As much as I dislike chrisaljoudi for doing shady things there as gorhill points out, this is as much of gorhil's hasty actions as it is chris' bad stewardship for the reputation of uBlock.

On April 1st, the transfer of ownership to chris are hours within the announcement of gorhil's leaving the project. I understand the frustrations he was getting, but that was not a smart decision on his part. Projects are easy to create, brand names are not.

While I agree that the transfer of ownership at least seems hasty, I feel that this is more chris's bad stewardship. Some of it is pretty ridiculous like that his homepage makes it feel as if he's claiming he created it.

https://chrismatic.io/

> Some of what I make: uBlock.

And if you click that uBlock link you read:

"made with love and care by Chris."

Which might not be untrue but is quite misleading.

Yeah, it is rather transparent he is trying to reap the rewards of others peoples effort to jack up his reputation.

I was going to ask, why didn't he convert it to an org and still maintain the tippy-top reins, but none of the day to day? Was it an ill-thought out rage-quit?

Has there been any reply from @chrisaljoudi?

Also, is there any reason this couldn't have moved to a github group (for the 'The uBlock Development Team') instead of someone else's personal account or something?

When @gorhill pointed out that @chrisaljoudi was removing precious features from his version, he just replied with a "Philosophy" link telling everyone that, now that he has acquired control over it, this project isn't a democracy and he's going to do whatever pleases him with the brand that all of us helped to build: https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock/issues/1306#issuecomm...

That's really rather disappointing. I missed out on all of this but I seem to have uBlock Origin as a result of installing it back when gorhill ran it, and I've been quite happy with it.

Though, to be fair, he did just add an 'investigating' label to the issue 8 hours ago after pointing to the philosophy w/o democracy.

A recent tweet from @ChrisAljoudi:

>"Better since it doesn't ask for donations."

>Honey, go screw yourself.

Asking for donations in the name of an open source project you didn't create, for yourself is the part that seems wrong.

This guy seems full of it.

Based on what I've read, it seems like Chris should transfer the repository back to Gorhill and make a new fork with his desired changes. On a side note, if Gorhill wanted to transfer the repository to an empowered* group of contributors, an open source Github repository utilizing Teams could be another option.

* By "empowered" I mean capable of independent action on the repository without waiting for Gorhill

I have to assume he wasn't aware of the feature or simply acted hastily.

Really dissapointed. I hope Chris is happy having completely stained his portfolio. You'd think a well maintained project would be worth more for his future career than some donations now.

uBlock Origin is the way to go.

Response from Chris.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_D1TpddtVUA

So what does this mean for the future of uBlock? Is this turdball now going to drive it into the ground? Or is there a fork in the works by the core devs that don't suck? Wat do.

Gorhill's 'fork' (read original repo) is under active development with official Firefox version coming soon to AMO.

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock

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