I had a similar emotional outburst where after contributing hundreds of hours to Stack Overflow, when I asked a question of my own, instead of answering an objective yes/no question people just argued with me in the comments about why I could possibly want to do whatever prompted me to ask my question. I delete my account and quit ever contributing to that site right then and there. I think I was just looking for an out and it was ultimately a good thing.
No idea if this is the case here, but I hope the author sticks with this decision. Although, looking at https://github.com/nvim-treesitter/nvim-treesitter/graphs/co... , it doesn't look like he started this project, so I'm not sure it's his place to archive it.
If you had the option to also delete all your contributions to the side, would you have done it?
If you had the option to exclude only certain people (e.g. those who argues with you) from seeing/using your contributions, would you have done it instead of deleting your account?
I am asking because I've too been burned and it's very commonly how an open source contributor's journey ends. So I've been toying with the idea that contributors should be able to exclude certain people or perhaps even groups of people from using their work.
Basically "I give away my work for free for anyone to use and build upon but if you don't appreciate it, if you treat me like shit, if you do any of X Y Z which hurts me or other people, then you're no longer allowed to use it".
i understand the sentiment, but the nature of FOSS is that i can't really prevent anyone from using it. i'd have to police it, and that would just lead to more misery.
i too contributed to stackoverflow and eventually stopped because it didn't feel worth the effort. i never asked a question though, so i didn't have the experience GP made, but i doubt i would want to delete everything, at least not without moving all my answers to another location.
once or twice when searching for the solution to a specific problem i was lead to a stackoverflow question and had to discover that the answer that solved my problem was my own from a decade earlier. so i too benefit from posting answers. deleting them would reduce that benefit.
> the nature of FOSS is that i can't really prevent anyone from using it
That's my point - maybe FOSS isn't the absolute good we've been lead to believe.
It was a response to locked down proprietary software which increasingly became hostile to its users. And it is (from a user's perspective) better that that for sure. But from a dev perspective, it's not as good as it could be.
> my answers
Exactly, those are your answers, your work. We've spent a lot of our limited time working for other people's benefit because we believed in it or sometimes because it was fun. But ultimately, it's becoming clear other people don't care and will throw us under the bus as soon as we're no longer useful. And then there's people who are just looking for a way to take advantage of us.
And I want to exclude both from benefiting from my work.
We should strive to find methods to make good, productive, pro-social people to benefit while keeping anyone who wants to exploit us away.
Getting free stuff is good for the user of the stuff, yes. Giving away stuff for free might not feel good if you don't like the people you're giving the stuff away to, yes.
People aren't "taking advantage" of you by benefiting from the free work that you voluntarily do. They may be rude towards you, but it's your choice to work for them or not.
If you release your work to the world, there's no license agreement in existence that will prevent "undesirables" from benefiting from your work. See: all of the AIs being trained on publicly accessible code (regardless of its license).
The answer is just, do write open source code if you think it's fun, and you're okay with the worst people you can imagine using your code. If you write a geodata library, it might be used in a targeting module for a bomb, which might in turn be launched towards civilians. That's just a consequence you'll have to accept.
Surely you have to understand that you own a plot of land, a house, the number in your bank account or the clothes on your back only to the extent that somebody is willing to perform violence on those who want to use "your property" for themselves. That might be you yourself but you can't be everywhere at once and you can't be awake all the time either. That protection comes from mutual agreement of people to defend each other's properties, usually through some institution such as the police/army/state.
Why should intellectual property be any different?
Why should I not be able to make an agreement with people like me that we only allow certain people to use our work under certain conditions and if any one of us violates the agreement (or an outsider decides to ignore it) we use violence to stop and punish that use?
> the people you're giving the stuff away to
Not giving it to them, they are taking it. I am making it available with instructions who can use it and how. Some people take it, following those instructions, some take it ignoring them. Would you use the word "give" if it was about leaked source code? What about leaked nudes of your girlfriend or daughter?
> See: all of the AIs being trained on publicly accessible code (regardless of its license).
That's a circular argument.
LLM companies claim what they're doing is legal. At best they're using a loophole - statistical interpolating autocompleters did not exist when copyright law was being written, I doubt many people could conceive of them at that time. At worst they are actively and knowingly violating the law, not to mention consent, of the best most altruistic people in the world to exploit them and bring about a new era of inequality and oppression.
Anyway, just because somebody gets away with something does not make it legal and certainly does not make it right.
> That's just a consequence you'll have to accept.
Or I can build both social and technical means to control the usage. Nothing is perfect but then if you want perfect, why do you lock your car or home?
> doesn't look like he started this project, so I'm not sure it's his place to archive it.
This is a very valid point. It indeed looks like it was done in affect rather than after careful discussion with the (at least) ten members of the nvim-treesitter org.
This is a common issue with tooling used by open source.
Either you alone own the repo but then you're a single point of failure. Or you give those perms to others but then any one of them can abuse it (or get hacked).
I'd like to see tooling which requires consensus or voting to make certain changes such as archiving a repo or publishing a new release.
No idea if this is the case here, but I hope the author sticks with this decision. Although, looking at https://github.com/nvim-treesitter/nvim-treesitter/graphs/co... , it doesn't look like he started this project, so I'm not sure it's his place to archive it.