"Johnathan, I truly hope you’re doing alright, but that was a dickhead thing to do."
Extremely judgmental especially since open source offers no warranties or guarantees and implicit in this is the very real possibility of the code simply disappearing. It isn't like there is some contract (social or otherwise) that requires people to leave their code up online.
Yeah, that's fine, but if you think of open source as an intellectual gift of sorts, isn't what he did sort of like giving a kid a chocolate bar and yanking it away and throwing it in the trash mid bite?
Wasn't hackety hack about teaching kids to code? It's kind of mean to yank down that project after lots of people advertised it and get others to use it. Do we expect kids to have a full copy of the git repo and know what to do with it? What about the website?
If you create Open Source Software you are putting a contribution in to the community. That contribution is often derived from or utilises other OSS.
I think of OSS as a movement. Publicly nuking your (popular) repositories is a step back for that movement.
Any developer has every right to do it. However, for those of us who are trying to get large enterprises to embrace and contribute to OSS, our task is a little harder this week than it was last week.
I agree. The advantage here is that his contributions aren't gone. The only thing I know of that's seemingly gone for good is TryRuby.
As for getting enterprises to embrace OSS: Wouldn't you say that the ability for people to do what _why did is a disadvantage? Commercial apps don't do things like that. I'm not knocking OSS, but that's certainly something to take into consideration.
They do. Companies go out of business. They kill products. I went through it in a couple situations when I worked in IT.
In one instance, a vendor was sued by another company and had to immediately pull distribution of an app that we depended on, and the alternative was unusable. That particular example also provides an example of the value of OSS: the app was open source, so we were able to keep using it and tweaking it for years.
The ability to do what _why did is a disadvantage but it's offset by the advantage of being able to keep as many copies of the source as you like. It is idealistic to think that we can rely on project authors to always make sure the code and documents are hosted. If you are going to use OSS you have to take it upon yourself to do a certain amount of maintenance. Part of what you are paying for with enterprise software is usually support and stability. Since OSS is (mostly) free, you have to invest a certain amount of time to get the same level of support and stability.
Extremely judgmental especially since open source offers no warranties or guarantees and implicit in this is the very real possibility of the code simply disappearing. It isn't like there is some contract (social or otherwise) that requires people to leave their code up online.