> Many maintainers want to please their users, and be helpful (which is admirable, and more power to them), which means #2 applies. Sure, the maintainer is entitled to say "fuck you, I want to sit on my project and you can fork it if you want", but he was, presumably, trying to be helpful and succumbed to pressure.
All the pro-social benefits with a side-dish of the nuclear option. That’s coherent I have to admit.
In that case one can limit one’s interactions to other invested parties, i.e. contributors. Granted then you are still interacting with the attacker but you’re spared from the peanut gallery.
In real life volunteering you don’t get random drive-by input from outsiders. The input (and whatever peer pressure) is only from other invested parties.
> I don't think the maintainer is at fault to any degree here.
I’m having a hard time understanding moral arguments. “Fault” and “blame”. Everyone is condemning the peanut gallery for complaining about passing on the maintainer stick to someone else. Yes, including people who say that he could have just “not got peer pressured”. To be clear it’s not about the maintainer having “fault” or the peanut gallery/the attacker being wrong. Both can have “fault” in different ways. Like, clearly the attacker is the one who did something bad. Now there’s only a question of what other people could have done differently.
> Sure, this could have been avoided if the maintainer refused to be pressured and kept sitting on the project and letting it die, but it's not his fault that he didn't do that, and I wouldn't want that to be the default for maintainers either.
The maintainer could have done something different but he didn’t and that’s not his fault. It seems that we all agree that he had a live option. You just want to not associate it with “fault”.
In another comment[1] I asked what moral obligation a maintainer has to herself. Only to herself.[2] Focusing on that angle seems more fruitful than talking about “fault” in the abstract since that just leads to back and forths about whether people should protect their wallets better or whether or not people should just stop pickpocketing people.
The goal of this subthread seems to be about how maintainers might protect themselves (for their own sake) from this kind of thing. Laying out the options that are in their hands (and not just how the world around them should become better) seems pertinent to the issue.
All the pro-social benefits with a side-dish of the nuclear option. That’s coherent I have to admit.
In that case one can limit one’s interactions to other invested parties, i.e. contributors. Granted then you are still interacting with the attacker but you’re spared from the peanut gallery.
In real life volunteering you don’t get random drive-by input from outsiders. The input (and whatever peer pressure) is only from other invested parties.
> I don't think the maintainer is at fault to any degree here.
I’m having a hard time understanding moral arguments. “Fault” and “blame”. Everyone is condemning the peanut gallery for complaining about passing on the maintainer stick to someone else. Yes, including people who say that he could have just “not got peer pressured”. To be clear it’s not about the maintainer having “fault” or the peanut gallery/the attacker being wrong. Both can have “fault” in different ways. Like, clearly the attacker is the one who did something bad. Now there’s only a question of what other people could have done differently.
> Sure, this could have been avoided if the maintainer refused to be pressured and kept sitting on the project and letting it die, but it's not his fault that he didn't do that, and I wouldn't want that to be the default for maintainers either.
The maintainer could have done something different but he didn’t and that’s not his fault. It seems that we all agree that he had a live option. You just want to not associate it with “fault”.
In another comment[1] I asked what moral obligation a maintainer has to herself. Only to herself.[2] Focusing on that angle seems more fruitful than talking about “fault” in the abstract since that just leads to back and forths about whether people should protect their wallets better or whether or not people should just stop pickpocketing people.
The goal of this subthread seems to be about how maintainers might protect themselves (for their own sake) from this kind of thing. Laying out the options that are in their hands (and not just how the world around them should become better) seems pertinent to the issue.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39882721
[2] Like asking about whether someone has a moral obligation to eat healthy. It’s not about other people.
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