[crabbygrabby]

I met a guy who got kicked away from the community because he had different political beliefs than a lot of the people there. Immediately after he got the boot he stopped contributing, they took control of his two yrs of research(multiple repos). I get it, it's OSS but at the end of the day it kinda looks like stealing someone's work. There's other instances of stuff like this too... Just hang around for a while and watch...

Not here to say it's all like that. But keep in mind if you aren't paying for the product, you probably are the product.

[DNF2]

There's only one person who's been kicked out of the community (in the sense of being banned from the discourse forum), and that was not due to 'political beliefs', but repeated abuse and personal attacks.

Anyway, how can anyone 'take control' of someone's repositories? Was this person kicked out of github too?

[crabbygrabby]

They forked them. Also this is not that person. And there's more instances of this than I think you realize.

[crabbygrabby]

Can't reply to you depth of discussion got too long I think. Yea they didn't get kicked out entirely not banned or anything but they became "persona non grata" over stuff in their personal life. At least that's how it was explained to me.

I dunno what you should do if someone leaves, but bullying someone until they leave, then after they do forking all their work is kinda crappy. Again I get that it's OSS, but a lot of people don't make OSS contributions and hope for that kind of outcome. It's worth putting out there imo.

[DNF2]

If you click on the timestamp ("17 minutes ago"), then you will be able to reply below the post.

OK, I don't know that person's situation then, and cannot speak to it. But bullying is definitely against the community guidelines, and my experience is that there's not a high tolerance for rudeness, in fact I think the community is quite conflict shy.

That this happens with some frequency is a pretty big surprise to me, as I said, I follow the community closely.

Is it possible that you know only one side of the story?

[StefanKarpinski]

From this description this is fairly obviously the LightGraphs situation, and that's a pretty misleading account of what happened. The person was not kicked out of anything—they were not blocked or banned from any platforms or forums. They choose, of their own volition, to stop participating in the community. I've never seen any evidence of bullying for political views or otherwise; maybe there was some, but if so it was never reported, and it would have been a clear and actionable community standards violation. Whatever their reasons, this person decided they wanted to leave, which is unfortunate—we don't want anyone to feel unwelcome—but it's their prerogative.

That would have been fine, if unfortunate, but they also wanted to "take their work with them" in the sense of archiving their registered open source package repos preventing any further maintenance or development. This desire was not about not wanting the maintenance burden—they were not willing to grant ownership of the repos to other maintainers. In short, the original author wanted to force all development of the packages by anyone to stop. Of course, that would have left all the people who had come to depend on those packages high and dry, since the code they'd come to depend on would get no bug fixes, security patches, etc. Despite the fact that there were active contributors to that code who were happy to take over maintenance.

Imagine if Linus Torvalds got mad one day and decided to insist that no one could do any further development of the Linux kernel. No bug fixes, no security patches, no new features. Linus out. That was the situation here. Fortunately this is not how open source works: open source licenses are not revokable and the ability to fork a project is baked into each license for this exact reason—so that a disgruntled author cannot screw over an entire community of people who have come to depend on their work. They don't have to keep doing work, but they also can't take away they've done. If Linus threw a tantrum and refused to allow any more work on Linux, the rest of the community could take over and continue maintaining the kernel—fixing bugs, patching security flaws, even adding new features. Linus could close down his git repo and never touch the kernel again, but other maintainers could continue to develop Linux and support the vast community of users who have come to depend on it.

Similarly, it would have been perfectly legal to fork LightGraphs and continue development in a new repo with the same name. Out of respect for the original author's wishes, however, the LightGraphs package was allowed to be "frozen" with no further development. But it would have been deeply irresponsible to cease all maintenance and leave all the people who use and depend on LightGraphs hanging, especially given that there were willing maintainers. So LightGraphs was forked and renamed to "Graphs"; the old repo has been allowed to remain frozen, while maintenance and development has continued under the Graphs name in a new repo. The author of LightGraphs got their wish for work on the thing called "LightGraphs" to cease. The users of the package didn't get screwed over since they can do a simple search and replace and keep using a maintained graphs package. Personally I think the community handled it with responsibility and grace.

[DNF2]

There's another issue. In addition to the open source license and what it promises, when you accept contributions from others it isn't just your work anymore. LightGraphs had 100 contributors, what about their efforts? Not to mention additional work that others have done on top of that in other libraries.

Who would contribute to a software library if they knew that the main dev could just mothball their efforts at any moment.

If you have donated a ball, you can no longer just pick it up and go home. If you don't want to donate work, don't do open source and invite others to join in.

[DNF2]

I don't know anyone else who got kicked out (that takes a lot). But I know of a situation where someone walked out due to a non-political disagreement. Perhaps that's the one.

I follow the community pretty closely, posters being banned (except pure spam accounts) is something I think I'd notice.

Besides, what can you do if someone walks away from an important package? Should everyone, including collaborators on that package just start from scratch? What?