> This is the absolute antithesis of the intent of open source.
I disagree with this assertion (...and with Frenck too). There was no need for NixOS packagers to involve HA here, they are outsourcing work upstream. Imagine some small-time driver author/maintainer asking Debian to remove their driver - and Debian's solution to honor this request is to ask Linus to drop the driver from his upstream tree!
The long-held tradition, when you disagree with upstream, is to maintain your own patch-set that you are responsible for and have to labor to keep current - that is not the antithesis of open source - it is very much in the spirit of exercising the right to change the source code as you see fit.
> Imagine some small-time driver author/maintainer asking Debian to remove their driver - and Debian's solution to honor this request is to ask Linus to drop the driver from his upstream tree!
If their reason is "we don't want our driver distributed from someone else's git repo" then it would be a very good idea to warn Linus about it!
HA are perfectly entitled to continue including the package. The NixOS dev opening that thread was doing so with the intent of warning them about a potentially problematic upstream maintainer. There's an argument to be made that that dev was overstepping, but they weren't making any demands: their intent was informational.
The community response was multiple HA admins expressing the opinion that NixOS should remove the package. That's definitively overstepping on their part, and completely against what open source is about.
I probably misread your assertion (and possibly the subtext), my initial interpretation was that the HA folk were saying "We're not getting involved with your dispute, or make any changes to accommodate you: take care of it", which is a fair thing to say to a downstream project.
To me - the subtext was NixOS still wants to do both: have reproducible builds that match HA and honor lib authors wishes. Lib author "rejected" forks, so one way was for NixOS to ask upstream HA to drop the library as a dependency. It doesn't sound like a friendly heads-up to me, from the thread title.
> the HA folk were saying "We're not getting involved with your dispute,
There are two HA folk (excluding frenck) commenting on that thread. The first demands than nixos devs should "Just do as he asks", which seems to me like they are very much getting involved in the dispute.
The second only comments to close the thread, and—while they do include the phrase "it's not our issue" in their closing comment—the rest of that comment accuses the OP of bad faith posting, and goes on to misrepresent the issue completely, claiming the problem is that NixOS are doing things that are unsupported (Frenck's objection was to NixOS packaging his package at all in any form, not to anything specific they were doing with it). So again, that seems like the second poster is very much contributing to the dispute, not "not getting involved".
> one way was for NixOS to ask upstream HA to drop the library as a dependency. It doesn't sound like a friendly heads-up to me
I guess a lot of this does depend on how reasonable you think that request would be. I thought the post seemed friendly as it was phrased politely. And I think removing the dependency should be reasonable if HA wished to remain an open source project given the dependency is now defacto closed source (perhaps not technically in licence text, but the author harassing anyone wishing to avail of the licence would seem to nullify that).
> from the thread title.
Title opens with the word "consider". Seems polite to me...
I disagree with this assertion (...and with Frenck too). There was no need for NixOS packagers to involve HA here, they are outsourcing work upstream. Imagine some small-time driver author/maintainer asking Debian to remove their driver - and Debian's solution to honor this request is to ask Linus to drop the driver from his upstream tree!
The long-held tradition, when you disagree with upstream, is to maintain your own patch-set that you are responsible for and have to labor to keep current - that is not the antithesis of open source - it is very much in the spirit of exercising the right to change the source code as you see fit.
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