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by wgerard 2343 days ago
Here's another analogy:

A homeless person asks for money. You don't give him money but give him some advice. Can the homeless person rightfully criticize you?

You can absolutely criticize choices made by volunteers. I don't think you need to think too deeply about this to imagine situations where few would object to criticizing a volunteer's behavior. An obvious one would be if an open source maintainer willfully included malware/etc. into their project - which, to many people, ignoring glaring security issues is vaguely equivalent.

I obviously don't think vitriol is warranted ever, but criticism obviously is from time-to-time.

1 comments

what is the relationship of your analogy to this situation? is the maintainer the homeless person in your analogy?

you can criticize all you want as an exercise of your critical thinking faculties but the volunteer is not in anyway obligated to heed the criticism.

"it's my money/time and I'll spend it how I want, which includes burning it"

is the fundamental axiom. Given that that is the foundation what sense would it make to criticize that person for burning the money - it's right there in the premise that they're allowed to!

> what is the relationship of your analogy to this situation? is the maintainer the homeless person in your analogy?

It's your analogy, you tell me.

> you can criticize all you want as an exercise of your critical thinking faculties but the volunteer is not in anyway obligated to heed the criticism.

Nobody said they were. Nobody's trying to punish the maintainer legally. That doesn't mean criticism won't be offered or warranted.

Here's another analogy: You have a right to be a jerk in real life. Nobody's going to physically or legally stop you, barring extreme circumstances. People will still criticize you for being a jerk, as is THEIR right.

in my analogy you're the homeless person and the maintainer is the charitable person. in your analogy the homeless person is getting advice from ...?

>People will still criticize you for being a jerk, as is THEIR right.

completely specious. code in a github repo is not active participation in society. the fact that it's public does not mean it's been submitted for evaluation in any way. criticizing a thing that wasn't critically submitted is meaningless. it's like calling my practice sketches inferior to commissioned pieces - no shit that's the point!

> in my analogy you're the homeless person and the maintainer is the charitable person. in your analogy the homeless person is getting advice from ...?

the maintainer?

> completely specious. code in a github repo is not active participation in society. the fact that it's public does not mean it's been submitted for evaluation in any way. criticizing a think that wasn't critically submitted is meaningless. it's like calling my practice sketches inferior to commissioned pieces - no shit that's the point!

Uh, what? By packaging something as a crate, by listing it on crates.io, you're submitting it to be used. If you don't want it to be used or evaluated, at all, why in the world would you publish something as a crate on a public registry?

This is more like submitting your sketches to a public art gallery and then being upset when the public criticizes it.

>This is more like submitting your sketches to a public art gallery and then being upset when the public criticizes it.

that's not what happened. there weren't simply discussions of the viability or soundness or the crate. there were implicit/explicit demands for changes. so your analogy is wrong again - it would be like submitting public sketches and then facing demands that the sketches be improved. does that sound like something that i as the artist should be comfortable with? more importantly does that sound like something a reasonable person would do (make demands for alterations to sketches submitted to a public art gallery)?

what are you talking about? The code was submitted to be used by the public as a crate on a public registry. There were ABSOLUTELY discussions of the soundness of the crate - that’s literally what sparked this issue, security flaws in the crate.

Are you sure you have a firm grasp on what actually transpired here?