Nvim-treesitter (13K+ Stars) is Archived(github.com) |
Nvim-treesitter (13K+ Stars) is Archived(github.com) |
So obviously the guy is behaving like an entitled jerk, but it’s also surely counter-productive (volunteer maintainers are unlikely to respond well to plain rudeness)? Unless the goal isn’t a productive outcome, but just to be mean?
They are just passionate and most of the times annoyed because something as simple is not being done right.
I don't think this is the case at all. You are commenting in a discussion on how a maintainer of an unstable project which very clearly and unambiguously only targets and supports a specific version of a runtime. Still, said maintainer is being pestered by entitled users who attack the maintainer and how they chose to invest their free time contributing to the project with accusations of being "insane".
This is not "passion". This is sheer entitlement, and abuse on top.
If this was passion, you'd see users contributing their work with proposals to post releases. Even very low effort things like forking the repo and posting their custom releases would be infinitely more productive. You know, the core of FLOSS.
But no. You have someone doing their best generously contributing their time to provide something to the public, and in return they get insults and abuse.
No wonder projects get archived.
Could you please link some of your projects? I could use some inspiration how to deal with entitled FOSS users who do not understand that they already got much more than what they paid for.
No, this is not adequate justification for such behavior towards volunteer FOSS maintainers.
1. He blames the maintainer that his distro doesn't ship latest neovim.
2. He didn't pull neovim from the Extra-Testing Arch branch.
3. He didn't pull neovim from AUR.
4. He doesn't have the knowledge to build from source.
5. He didn't pull the tarball from git.
6. He didn't pull the AppImage from git.
There's so many solutions to choose from and he chose none; pure ragebait.
Some people are just mean. They spend their angry little lives walking around "outraged" by any minor inconvenience. They assume every single little happenstance was designed to make them miserable.
The greatest thing about having a good education and working with other experts is that I generally don't meet this people that much, but I remember them all too well.
And most people who wronged me were never really rude to me. So i don't even use someone's rudeness as filter for anything.
Are you aware you are talking about a FLOSS project that was gifted to you, and you are advocating for attacking for abusing the creator of said project because you can't even bother to contribute anything back?
If you're in a social bubble, which is hard to avoid nowadays, I recommend watching police body cam videos to help recalibrate where the ends of the spectrum are. It's also given me sympathy for police in general
The source of a library needs an update every time there is a configuration change in _any_ tree-sitter parser supported.
The only sustainable option is not use these helpers and manage editor dependencies manually: tree-sitter parsers, LSP servers (looking at you Mason), and plugins (looking at you neovim distros).
And in a similar vein, if queries (.scm files) were hosted in each parser repo, it would also be fairly easy to handle.
I think it’s the latter part with the query files that is the challenge here.
For my text editor I had to yank nvim-treesitter queries and rewrite them.
Archiving a project which has other maintainers is an overreaction.
Also your phrasing of "would be fine" implies that there are things that are not "fine" to do when doing work for free for the public benefit, which is exactly the sort of entitled attitude that makes many (myself included) uninterested in open sourcing their own projects.
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 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".
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.
I know Free and OpenSource software is only available thanks to maintainers who spend their time and money to make it available. This type of sentence though, makes all I just mentioned easy to forget, when they take that tone with you.
> when they take that tone with you.
This makes it sound as if you took it personally?
My guess: People would freak out if FOSS maintainers actually did this.
A variation on this is the above plus they get a hoard of friends/wellwishers/bots etc to raise more issues claiming censorship and it devolves into a massive ad hominem flame war, doxxing, death threats and the usual rubbish that ruin a good thing.
I've seen DRF did that. Not sure if that is not possible for normal accounts.
You will hear only crickets.
Adding the slightest friction, and making potential drama 1:1 only, demotivates most people.
You might miss out on an occasional good feedback, though.
Further downside is that your project will have a harder time becoming popular, and being popular is secretly (or not so secretly) the motivation for many in open source.
Will be a lot more honest though.
I guess he really needed the latest ci/chore commits
But seriously, this is messed up. People need to learn to treat others with respect and kindness. Hopefully the maintainer is able to simply move on after archiving the repo, and isn't dealing with any mental struggles from dealing with years of entitled users demanding things for free.
In popular open source projects this is a recurring issue. I suspect the only way to deal with it is to either shift to a platform that has better tools for moderation, or end the project like the maintainer has done. Let someone else fork it and deal with the users.
To clason: Thank you for all the work you did maintaining nvim-treesitter!
Thank you Christian Clason for giving us nvim-treesitter! And always remember, for each idiot insulting you there are thousands of happy, silent users.
I'm guessing the attitude of "users and supporters" of the project such as shushtain complaining and wanting clason to do all the work instead of just doing it themselves, was a factor in him deciding to step away from the project.
Considering this is a very common plugin in the neovim ecosystem, it will probably get forked and maintained by someone else, like null-ls was forked into none-ls.
If you have a problem with how open source works just please head back to vscode.
What to do as maintainer? Can everyone of them find piece?
The point they seem to be making is that it never was their problem, but they were just solving it for everyone for free anyway, and in return they were doing it wrong and they should stop interacting with people.
Honestly even when people are being paid to work for you and their job is to do what you ask them to, speaking to them like that is never going to work out.
Hate it when people break backwards compatibility. For me it's sacrosanct, more important than absolutely anything else.
I only have a handful of plugins so the system works well. And I have a 500 line init.vim (and no other config).
Some ecosystems like golang share this principle and so I can freely update packages without worrying about breakages. But other ecosystems(nvim, python, etc) I'm a lone warrior
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.
People seem to have this notion that there's some theoretical possible world where everything is completely moral, and we're just failing to get there. But that is not true. You get locally moral and globally moral arrangements, and they're not necessarily going to mesh. It's just like any other large system.
Guy can be justified from their perspective, people can be justified for distancing themselves from him. That's life. Having a reason for something is further the bare minimum, not the endgame.
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.
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.
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.
Which of these projects is more likely, relative to the other in its pair, to be targeted by users whose expectations are presented disrespectfully by whatever means (let's assume email) the users can discover?
1a) A project that has recent commits, but has pull requests and issues disabled.
1b) That exact same project, with the banner "This repository was archived by the owner" shown on all pages and objects within it.
2a) A project that left a work in progress unfinished six months ago, but has pull requests and issues disabled.
2b) That exact same project, with the banner "This repository was archived by the owner [six months ago]" shown on all pages and objects within it.
As one can reasonably predict, archiving when I'm not actively pushing commits turns out to be an effective way to stem the tide of jerks who otherwise pick a fight by email/irc / discord/forum / blah/blah / etc., in hopes of persuading me to commit further resources to their unpaid benefit or to finish something I don't care to work on finishing right now / this week/month / quarter/semester / year/decade / ever. It's archived, so clearly it'll never be finished, which helps enforce an appropriate calibration of expectations upon those desiring the outcome — and if I someday finish it, hooray, but no one has any plausible way to justify any expectations to the contrary, no matter how hard they wish otherwise. Thus why I recommend using archiving to remove the social pressure component of working in public on GitHub.
Of course, if you have a better solution than you've offered so far here, I'm certainly willing to consider it.
Though many of my projects are completely free for the users.
Latest being this one already past 1000+ active users https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.macrocodex...
If you don't listen to your passionate users, i doubt you'll ever grow.
Someone being rude/entitled doesn't matter to me, I only care about if what they are saying actually makes any sense
He's making a general point about "regardless of how something is presented to you, at the end of the day you have to look at the actual information, and if there is some truth in it, then it would be illogical to dismiss it".
On an open source project that I’m doing for my own enjoyment rude people are not welcome. I’m doing that for my own enjoyment - to decompress after dealing with rude people. Close issue, won’t fix, ban free user.
++ izzat!!!
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?
sure, but the amount of nonsense (to avoid the b-word) i am willing to put up with depends on the amount of money i expect to make from the project. for unpaid work that amount is zero. if i am investing my free time and i allow you to benefit from it, you better be nice when you talk to me.
when i run a business then the information gained potentially makes my product sell better. for a volunteer project i may not care about popularity, so the information gained is not necessarily of any benefit.
If you archive it, then sure user's are less likely to send you disrespectful messages by whatever means (assuming they can find such means), but they are also less likely to use it, because you have basically said "this project is abandoned". Which if you don't want users at all, I guess that's fine, but then I'm curious why you bothered to publish it publicly at all.
There are only maybe a few thousand people at most worldwide who could benefit from what I’m doing, and only 1% of them might actually go looking for this. Can you imagine working as an open source maintainer on a project with a hard cap on audience size of a hundred people? Seems fine to me; I’m one of those hundred, after all :)