You could use separate tools for those tasks. JIRA/Bugzilla/etc. for issue tracking, Sublime Merge or equivalent for comparing a dev branch to a main branch, and CI/CD with Azure Pipelines or whatever the “modern” equivalent of Jenkins is.
That isn’t as convenient as an all-in-one tool, and might not be what the user you’re responding to is doing. But it’s doable.
Sure, but then you're vulnerable to that going down. The question was about why people can be substantially impacted by relatively brief forge downtime.
> I still really don’t understand what is so entitled about asking for a level of base empathy and care from maintainers.
> People now yell at you that their only obligation is whatever is spelled out in the license they attached to the code.
Let’s turn your implied question around: if a person wants to share code without any expectation of care and maintenance, what should they do? Is the entire concept bogus, and the developer should just keep the code to themselves forever? Or put a “DO NOT USE FOR YOUR BILLION DOLLAR COMPANY” in a README? What communication other than the license could reasonably be provided?
I think the person you’re responding to made a pretty good point that open-source is sometimes the passion of an unpaid 1-person “team” and sometimes the product of a VC-funded attempt to buy goodwill. The idea that asking for more from maintainers is entitled is clearly suitable for the former case but not the latter. Now that Bun has been bought out perhaps they are more deserving of scrutiny.
Textualism is a scam wrapped in academic regalia. It is implausible on its face and arguing that “we only have the text to go off of” sounds nice and is demonstrably not how the law has been parsed.
> What communication other than the license could reasonably be provided?
Nobody encodes everything in text. No law can be fully represented in text. The law is a combination of many things including norms and customs at a moment in time. The law as written is a framework. This can be demonstrated pretty obviously in just how some laws are written intentionally vague because we have human beings to parse them for meaning and context. A legal/justice machine does not and will never exist as long as these are frameworks for human interaction. This is not a computable problem and attempting it to frame it as one is deeply harmful.
I have met a lot of EECS folks who think that the law is just a set of rules to be applied and that a consistent and fair decision will just “happen”. This is ridiculous and anyone who thinks this should be smacked with a copy of the Bluebook.
There is also kind of a spirit vs. letter of the law issue here. The intention and spirit in which this software is given out should and must inform how the law is interpreted. Arguing this isn't how the law works is just wrong. I stress this because it shows just how fuzzy the law really is. I think people want bright lines where they don't exist. I don't know what the obsession with this is, but it is unproductive.
I certainly understand that this desire to return to a more nuanced and more empathetic view of all of this has gradients, but I think I am just deeply saddened how any attempt to suggest that there were and should still be some implied cultural norms regarding expectations and the response from some folks really sounds like an angry Ayn Rand instead of a discussion about what that means. It’s just a blanket rejection for a lot of people here. Software is for people. The consumers are ultimately people. People are the only things that matter.
Like, you start a business and society—through the government and law has said—hey, you can’t refuse to serve people based on certain reasons. This is actively being attacked by some people with the same pathetic argument of, “You can’t tell me what to do. I hate X and it’s my free speech right to tell them to go pound sand. I never agreed to the civil rights acts!” It’s like the stupidest version of Ron Swanson.
With regards to interpreting the laws, I mostly agree with you, although I certainly haven’t delved as deep into the true meaning of law in society.
But I still don’t understand what you actually expect from maintainers of free and open source software. In prior comments you have used words like “empathy” but I’m wondering in more specific terms what you mean. What should be maintained, and what should be abondoned? What should stay stable and what should be updated?
I ask because when you say stuff like
> I am just deeply saddened how any attempt to suggest that there were and should still be some implied cultural norms regarding expectations
I’d feel very differently about that comment based on the “expectations” that are “implied”.
And perhaps your answers might help me out a bit, to be honest. There are plenty of times when I use an open source library and get annoyed by the decisions of upstream developers, but I often wonder if my annoyance should be directed at upstream at all, or at myself.
> Contributions from people from identities known and consistent before the AI-age are fine
Unfortunately, according to the article:
> Giovannini has participated in discussions at least as far back as 2018, and his activity in Bugzilla goes back to at least 2016. He does not appear to have been a particularly active contributor to the project, but his involvement clearly predates the agentic AI era. Whether his account is now being operated by a human attacker, an agentic AI, or a mix of both, it has a legitimate history prior to its recent activity.
So people would have to not only verify the age of Giovanni’s accounts, but judge whether his behaviour was normal.
Near the top, the page claims it’s about learning the difference between checking, saving and money market accounts.
In the entire linked article, where is the explanation for what a savings account is? Most of the early paragraphs are just waffling about how “Types of Accounts” are important. I’m pretty sure I read the phrase “money is emotional” before even getting to any description of any type of account. The word “savings” almost never appears and none of the instances seemed to define a savings account.
Honestly, is this content written by AI? In my opinion it’s acceptable to use AI to replace the boilerplate HTML, JavaScript and CSS of your site. But using AI for the actual writing risks turning your “educational tool” into a tool for misinformation.
EDIT: according to Pangram, 100% of the first two paragraphs are AI generated. Which is not a surprise at all, I don’t see how a human tasked with describing types of bank accounts would struggle this hard.
They could if they feel it's worthwhile. Most companies don't, but most companies don't do most of the stuff mentioned in this article, because they're lazy. If they're not lazy they can absolutely follow up any unpaid debt in court, no matter whether you tried to use a virtual credit card or anything like that.
In German-speaking (DACH) countries the companies aren't lazy and they will take you to court and the court will make you pay all legal and court fees as well as the debt. It's a near certainty they will bother. In the USA you're hoping they won't bother and they'll be satisfied with just banning you as a customer. I think this is because each party pays their own legal fees in the USA.
Point #5 seems near impossible and even furthermore undesirable. Unless we are envisioning an application with all the characteristics of a web browser, but using different layout languages.
That isn’t as convenient as an all-in-one tool, and might not be what the user you’re responding to is doing. But it’s doable.
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