[mieseratte]

> I apologize for the disruption to your workflow. I will be happy to restore the old repository and gem versions if Chef cancels their contract with the agency.

Great, take something out on me because of your personal politics!

I, for one, look forward to a future of navigating politicized open-source constraints of each creator.

And of course, the creator of Chef-Sugar works for Google.

Edit: Here's a mirror: https://gitlab.openminds.be/mirror/chef-sugar/-/branches

Edit: Appears Chef itself has taken over: https://github.com/chef/chef-sugar

[scandox]

I think it's reasonable whatever one's view. He made it. He can pull it. This is literally what this freedom is all about. I don't understand when the personal expression of developers of free software became constrained by some kind of nebulous corporate responsibility.

[mieseratte]

Sorry, I'm just a jaded old man pining for the old days of just throwing some code over the fence and letting folks use it.

[scandox]

Well he's hasn't climbed over the fence and taken it back. He just stopped throwing it over the fence on a continuous basis , right?

[mieseratte]

I suppose that would make it an empty gesture devoid of practical consequence then?

Looking through the commit history[0], he doesn't even look to be all that prolific as compared to other contributors. One would imagine those folks would keep on keeping on in some fashion.

[0] - https://gitlab.openminds.be/mirror/chef-sugar/commits/master

[eropple]

That "day" never really existed; you always own the consequences of your actions, even if you choose to pretend you don't.

Seth, to his credit, is doing what he can about his. Legally, there isn't much. But if a minor inconvenience--and it is minor because Chef is already busily scrubbing his name from "chef-sugar-ng", including removing him from the cookbook's authors, they can get their replacement just fine--alerts members of the Chef community to their ratshit behavior, that's a positive. Because some, who do not hold amorality as a virtue as is en vogue in these parts, will probably take exception to it, too, and they should know.

[onion2k]

I, for one, look forward to a future of navigating politicized open-source constraints of each creator.

You get what you pay for.

[mieseratte]

What is your point here? I'm not following.

[JMTQp8lwXL]

You didn't pay for the software, so there is no service-level agreement. The software could be pulled at any time, for any reason, or no reason at all.

[missosoup]

If you have a problem with FOSS and authors having ownership of their creations, feel free not to use it.

[mieseratte]

I contribute to FOSS, have a number of small projects ballpark of [1,000, 10,000) users. I guarantee I disagree with a non-trivial part of those folks, politically. I don't put in constraints to deny them because of that. That's the world I want to live in.

> feel free not to use it.

If you disagree, feel free not to comment /s

[iamtheworstdev]

It is a bit ridiculous. Are people going to start pulling things from projects because they find out that FOSS is used heavily by the intelligence community?

[Crinus]

If an author of a free software believes that it is against his own morals to indirectly assist some organization that they see as immoral then, yes, they have the freedom to stop working on that software as there is no obligation on their part to continue doing so.

[iamtheworstdev]

I should have clarified my point a bit. I'm not debating ones prerogative to do it. But we as nerds know the things we make can and are used by "bad"* actors but typically say it's better for the common good so we should keep it. Things like encryption, heavy math libraries in the world of nuclear physics, rocket science, VPNs, etc.

So when we discover one bad person using our software and subsequently yank it, aren't we being a bit hypocritical?

* I quote that because not everyone agrees that DHS and ICE are bad actors and want to avoid a political tangent

[eropple]

YMMV, but to me there's a difference between directly creating financial benefit for the owners of a largely closed software ecosystem--and Chef in practice is a largely closed software ecosystem, it's single-source and they're doing their damnedest to squeeze money out of their users right now--and more general open-source publishing.

[iamtheworstdev]

So what you're telling me is people would be really disappointed if they noticed Puppet Labs makes money from the same people?

[onion2k]

Yes.

[missosoup]

It's their prerogative to do that if they so choose. If you don't like it, don't rely on it. Get commercially licensed software where this can't happen or write your own.

[ModernMech]

I would if they were accepting $100,000 contracts with the NSA. Yeah.

[shagie]

https://opensource.org/osd-annotated

> 5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups

> The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.

> 6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor

> The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.

---

Being potentially used by organizations you don't agree with is what open source entails.

There also appears to be nothing wrong in the FOSS model of taking the last published version and forking it... and releasing that.

[Crinus]

A FOSS license allows an organization you dislike to continue using your software, but it doesn't require that you continue working on and providing that software on any specific way (there is the requirement in GPL to provide on request for a limited amount of time but it doesn't specify method and that can be done via - e.g. - email).

Others can pick it up from where you left and continue, of course.

[missosoup]

The license doesn't do any of those things. The author has chosen to stop hosting the project because of those things.

That is their right.

[Cthulhu_]

So what's stopping anyone - e.g. Chef or ICE - from just forking the code and continuing as before?

[sgift]

In this case probably that the author removed all files from the repository. But if someone finds a copy: Nothing. It was (as far as I can gather) under an open-source license and people continue to have all the rights associated with that.

[mieseratte]

Here's a mirror: https://gitlab.openminds.be/mirror/chef-sugar/-/branches

[mc32]

This is ridiculous. It’s unsustainable. There is no way you can audit all your users to determine how law abiding, ethical, moral and whatever other measure you want to use.

It’s a bit of immature posturing.

If I need something and I can’t buy it directly I’ll go to a third party who will buy it for me. So it’s kind of futile anyway.

Imagine if Bernie wins and then everyone who doesn’t like socialized medicine (physicians, etc., go on strike — oh, my bad, they wouldn’t be allowed). Or big pharma said, we’re not selling to government, they are telling us to depress prices, we disagree!

[marcosdumay]

> Or big pharma said, we’re not selling to government, they are telling us to depress prices, we disagree!

Big pharma has said this many times to many governments. When Brazil started to negotiate, we had to invalidate patents so somebody would sell the drugs.

[mc32]

Do you think that was the right and consistent decision and did you agree with it?

[marcosdumay]

What decision?

The pharma industries were acting like perfect assholes, denying their product to people that need it for strong-arming them into unreasonable prices. But that's entirely dependent on the details, they could be as well just be negotiating a fair price and the description above wouldn't change a bit.

The government was well within its right to invalidate the patents for protecting its people. That again is dependent on the details, it could be an antieconomical action against the freedom of initiative and still have the same description. The fact that those same pharma companies currently get more profit than they did at the time, by selling a much larger amount of medicine (for a lower unitary price) is strong evidence that the government was right.

[chris_wot]

It wasn't taken out on you, personally.

[marcosdumay]

But it was taken out from him, personally.

[chris_wot]

He can still fork it from other sources.

[mieseratte]

Never claimed it was.

[chris_wot]

Then stop complaining?

[Ar-Curunir]

I think we can all agree that, whatever your politics, working for ICE is abhorrent and deserves punishment.