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by pekk
4792 days ago
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If I put a lot of work into making something, it does not make me accountable to do whatever you want to that work. Sorry, it does not work that way. But if I open sourced it, you can make the change yourself. Open sourcing it does not mean that other people are entitled to control it. |
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The developer in this case is part of a self appointed core team who have the keys to infrastructure bought with other peoples donations.
He has removed functionality written by someone else.
In neither case does this "it's my ball, don't tell me how to play with it" thing apply.
The wider problem-
Zooming out from this specific case, from open source projects to standards organizations, unelected cabals have a great deal of influence over what happens in technology.
Why is it important? Try this scenario - What if a key player at Mozilla (who got the position because his company bought them servers) decided to delete FTP support. Would that be okay?
Sure, we could fork Mozilla, add FTP back in. But if our fork didn't get much adoption, then it wouldn't make it into linux distributions, wouldn't have the manpower to merge in bugfixes from the mainline. It would fizzle, Chrome would drop it, then IE, and FTP would be gone from the world.
So these people do have power that the ability to fork doesn't nullify.
The community gives them power and resources (especially in the case of large projects where the project lead wrote less than 1% of the code). Can you really say they shouldn't be held to account for how they use them?