I don't owe you scala-tools.org

http://goodstuff.im/no-i-dont-owe-you-scala-toolsorg

by automagical • 15 years ago

102 74 15 years ago

earl2• 15 years ago

tl;dr:

David Pollack created lift. He also created and ran scala-tools.org, a maven repo and documentation host for scala stuff. He's recently decided to transition off much of his scala involvement, in part because his new startup visi.pro uses neither scala nor the jvm.

Several months ago he asked for help taking over scala-tools. There was not much response, and amongst the handful of people who stepped up, there was some sort of personality conflict.

In response, he temporarily shut it down and is transitioning the site to new hosts and maintainers. The internet is pitching a tantrum. Pollack is put out, since all the whiners where invisible when he was asking for new maintainers several months ago. Also, whiners who neither helped then and aren't stepping up to help now reek of entitlement: what right do they enjoy to Pollack's continued donation of time and money, just because he historically provided something the community liked?

soc8816• 15 years ago

While I think he has all rights to feel insulted by an individual, I think holding the whole community responsible for that individual and threatening to use the site for damaging the reputation of the Scala community as a whole is a bit too much.

effu• 15 years ago

This. He reads like a 14 year old boy who's been jilted by his first girlfriend. Do grown mean really need a website for "working through my sadness about opportunities lost" when they change primary programming language?

He's such a source of drama; the Scala community is better off without him.

SkyMarshal• 15 years ago

I think the community knows he's not holding the whole of them responsible. David is a well known, smart, decent, civil guy among them.

And maybe I missed it, but I didn't see anywhere he threatened to "use the site for damaging the reputation of the Scala community as a whole".

dmragone• 15 years ago

Apologies in advance for a comment that adds no value, but I feel the need to say it:

Thank you for summarizing. As someone who is not nearly as technical as many people on HN, I really appreciate seeing a summary of an article that can cut to the chase and hep me understand what's going on.

icebraining• 15 years ago

TL;DR - The internet is full of ungrateful dicks.

It often bothers me the vitriol that open source projects get for not fixing some bug or even add some feature that certain user considers important. But I don't see a best course of action than simply ignoring them. There's no upside to wasting your time and mental energy replying.

(By the way, I agree with the author. I just think this post is preaching to the choir. The targeted people will just disregard it).

christkv• 15 years ago

A name and shame site for dicksinopensource.com would be nice to nominate the biggest troll of the year.

tikhonj3• 15 years ago

Any large community is going to accumulate some unfortunate people. These people then stand out because they tend to be loud and annoying. Additionally, people are apparently more likely to criticize something free!

So I agree entirely that the best option is ignoring them. If you're a really nice person--and some are--then you would ignore the tone of a reasonable request and do it anyhow. Now, you don't have to, but that's the beauty of open source: freedom. You never have to do anything.

I suspect that this post is the result of a little bit of undeserved, subconscious guilt. I know that when I feel guilty despite clearly being right, I become defensive; I could certainly imagine a similar reaction here. Or it could be something else entirely.

pwpwp• 15 years ago

[OT] Scala is definitely the current hot spot for PL drama

teaspoon• 15 years ago

This reminds me of Neil Gaiman's "George R.R. Martin is not your bitch" essay, about reader entitlement:

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/05/entitlement-issues.htm...

tedunangst• 15 years ago

I agree, but only up to a point. When a book is advertised as part of a series, that is in effect a promise that there will be a series. Otherwise it's false advertising.

mark_l_watson• 15 years ago

I find David's position to be reasonable. Also, if he feels that Haskell (with a little Objective-C glue code) meets his current business and technical needs better than Scala, that is his decision to make, and based on his technical abilities I would bet that he made a good decision.

shinratdr5• 15 years ago

This is a great example of why large parts of the open source community are complete clusterfucks. There have been some amazing programs and services that emerge from this model, but by and large all projects have the same caveats: Nobody takes overall responsibility, everybody contributor is an unquestionable Jesus character, every contribution is a donation with strings attached, expecting the status quo to be maintained on a popular project is unabashed entitlement.

It's not like his standpoint is wrong, or incorrect, even selfish or unreasonable. Yet it does still damage the community and nobody will take responsibility for said damage. This is why people get paid for things. No matter how altruistic your intentions and actions, if people come to rely on your service then they will be upset and frustrated when it disappears.

TL;DR - He's right, he doesn't owe anyone anything. That doesn't make his actions any less damaging though, and simply glossing over this as "user entitlement" is ignoring a systemic problem with unfunded open source projects.

rue• 15 years ago

Paid-for projects go under all the time. This is nothing particularly unique to open source except that with OSS, someone can actually take over.

People just couldn't be bothered to, and are now paying the price.

shinratdr5• 15 years ago

Actually no, people don't just take their ball and go home like this in funded proprietary projects that aren't maintained by very small teams. If he was a paid for contributor, he would have handed off the domain no question. Because it wouldn't have been his to keep in the first place, it would have belonged to the project collective.

Smaller proprietary get shut down and money dries up, but nobody simply throws a wrench into the machine quite like up and leaving a project but taking project resources with you like that. It simply doesn't happen outside of the open source community, and it is a unique problem. Branding it as a simple shutdown is also glossing over the problem.

earl2• 15 years ago

So what you're saying is most open source communities are like the onion article: "Report: 98 Percent Of U.S. Commuters Favor Public Transportation For Others" [1]. Someone should step up and provide hosting and maven repos and blah blah blah... but not me. Which makes you wonder if there's really a community or it's just a handful of people donating to charity and a thousand people taking.

[1] http://www.theonion.com/articles/report-98-percent-of-us-com...

shinratdr5• 15 years ago

Or alternatively, that there is a very good reason most transactions in life are simple exchanges of funds for goods or services.

bad_user• 15 years ago

Personally I would rather have people contribute to open-source and quit when they want. I rather prefer the "clusterfucks" you mention, versus the alternative.

That's the nature of open-source that people don't understand: it's not about getting stuff for free, although that's a nice side-effect. Instead it's about having the freedom to fork it.

So if you find yourself in such a situation, either donate enough money to keep the maintainer happy or step up and contribute.

shinratdr5• 15 years ago

> So if you find yourself in such a situation, either donate enough money to keep the maintainer happy or step up and contribute.

I think saying essentially "throw unlimited funds at it with no promise of a solution or 'patch it yourself'" is also simply glossing over the problem. "I prefer it" is a great justification for you, it doesn't solve the issue for anyone else though and it's not a productive line of thinking.

kstenerud3• 15 years ago

It's about managing user expectations, which David has done rather poorly.

People have short memories. When you're going to shut something down, you really should put up a HUGE javascript timer at the top of the page saying:

83 days, 14 hours, 23 minutes, 11 seconds until this site shuts down. Contact me if you can take over maintenance.

Unless it's constantly in their face, they won't feel the urgency, and so they won't act.

However, now that Dave's said "time's up", the urgency is felt, but there's nothing people can do, thus their frustration.

You can say "The users should have known" till you're blue in the face, but so long as you fight against human nature rather than guiding them in ways reinforced by their nature, you have only yourself to blame for the fallout. Such is the responsibility that comes with leadership.

bigiain2• 15 years ago

I'm not sure I agree with that at all.

Someone retiring from participation in any particular community has no obligation to enforce any sense of urgency on the remaining people.

This all reads to me as though the "fight against human nature" is revealing more about the currently-offended section of the Scala community that about David. From my reading, he let them know he was out many months ago, and their reaction was "Whatever. We'll just keep freeloading on his time/hosting-costs/sense-of-responsibility." Now their "human nature" lack of urgency has bitten them on the ass, and they're trying to make out like that's not their own fault... Not classy...

snprbob86• 15 years ago

> has no obligation

Maybe so, but it would have prevented (or at least reduced) the backlash. Many people don't follow all the mailing lists or core-contributor communication channels, so a badge on the page to alert the casual users would have been a nice thing to do. Sure, he has no duty or obligation, but he knew people were using it, so he knew people were missing it, so he could have facilitated a more graceful transition if he wanted to maximize good will.

smashing3• 15 years ago

I couldn't agree less. User's are ultimately responsible for managing their own expectations. The real lesson is about boundaries and that is what David Pollak is establishing in his blog post.

kstenerud3• 15 years ago

The problem is that this goes completely against human nature.

A leader's primary responsibility is stability. If he can't do that, he's considered by his followers to be a poor leader. It doesn't matter if that's unfair; that's how we've evolved because a leader who brings and maintains stability has historically brought the best chances of survival for the group.

David can post whatever he wants, but so long as he goes against human nature, he might as well try to make a river run uphill for all the good it'll do. All he's doing now is ruining his own credibility in the eyes of those who followed him. It may not be fair, but that's how things work.

One should never take upon themselves the mantle of leadership unless they're prepared to go all the way. That's the real lesson here.

raganwald2• 15 years ago

The form letter template for open source abandonware:

http://raganwald.posterous.com/form-letter-template-for-open...

tikhonj3• 15 years ago

There's nothing wrong with dropping support, but trying to delete the source on the internet seems petty and completely unnecessary. Some of the projects I use a lot were basically abandoned but left open (hey, Google Code and Github are free); they were later picked up, improved and supported by others. (JS2 mode is the best example of this.)

Also, I really think you should be polite even if rudeness is justified. Of course, being polite does not mean yielding to requests. But that's a different matter entirely.

raganwald2• 15 years ago

> trying to delete the source on the internet seems petty and completely unnecessary

One of the beauties of nearly all forms of free stuff is that the source is free. If users are actively maintaining it, they have their own repositories and forks. Even pure consumers will have their own copies of the source. I will not disparage the motives of people who give me free stuff and then decide for themselves how they wish to discontinue giving me free stuff, but I will say that removing the source ought to be an inconvenience at worst, and of no great consequence in most cases.

See also: “Ideas are forever”

http://raganwald.posterous.com/ideas-are-forever

p.s. I hope you realized that my tongue was firmly in cheek and were responding in kind, not suggesting that David Pollock is petty and rude :-)

dkhenry3• 15 years ago

The less he is involved in the scalar community the better. Yes he is right no one has any inherent right to his work or his infrastructure. however he treats the site like his gift to us simple mortals. Here is why people are upset ,because that was a maven host for a bunch of scalar software and instead of transitioning it to a new owner he said no its mine now I paid for it find your own domain, ohh and by the way rewrite all your code and documentation and tutorials to point to another site because I want to be paid for the community others created around my hardware and domain name.

Again he has every right to do what he is doing its his stuff , but its still a very disrespectful way he went about doing it.

avree• 15 years ago

He tried to transition it to a new owner. No one answered the call.

soc8816• 15 years ago

No, not really. It was about maintenance work.

dkhenry3• 15 years ago

No he didn't. there was no call to transition. There was this statement.

"The Scala community should be serviced by the company that is making money off the efforts of the Scala community, Typesafe, rather than a bunch of people contributing thousands of dollars a year of hardware and bandwidth and time to do something that could be done by the commercial Scala entity."

Combined with this statement

"Whatever I think that monetary value is, it's likely a few orders of magnitude more than others think the value is. It's not even worth, in my opinion, trying to price it."

This is about money and the lack of it going to Pollak for a site whose sole value is that it is used by members of a FOSS community. There was no call for transition people would have stepped up for that. What there was was a call to keep running _his_ site for _him_ and keeping the ownership and value in _his_ hands. I can understand why people didn't jump at that opportunity. If he would like to transition the domain and repositories to community ownership and no one stepped up to administer the site then more power to him let it go dark, but there are plenty of people willing to host and administer the domain, David isn't interested in them.

alan_cx• 15 years ago

On the face of it, this guy seems reasonable, just a little harsh. Sounds like he has good reason to be a bit harsh.

Seems to me that what we have here is a techie programmer type who does not entirely get customer relations, and hasn't managed to shape the message that well. Which is pretty much as it should be, the two skill sets don't usually collide. And I suppose why companies that can afford it get customer relation advice or employees. Perhaps some of these groups or what ever, should look for volunteers who do understand PR. Maybe they would be looking to bring this open source spirit out side of tech related areas.

nknight5• 15 years ago

The response to these incidents is depressingly predictable. "Yes he has the right to shut it down, but..." -- no, there is no "but".

Consider this: An employee quits his job. Do you say "Yes, he has the right to quit, but..."? No. There is no "but". He has the right to quit, period.

Involuntary servitude isn't allowed even when someone is getting paid for it, what the hell makes you think it's acceptable when they aren't, and are even investing their own resources?

He's not being a jerk, he's not being harsh. His right in this matter is absolute, and he's already given the community more of an opportunity than was necessary -- legally, ethically, or socially -- to step up. He has no obligation of any kind to keep putting his time and money into it. If you want slavery, build yourself a time machine, don't demand that he do it for you.

lmm2• 15 years ago

He has the right to quit, but the domain is a .org, and its name is not his but that of the language; it should belong to the community. If he wants to stop running it that's fine, but he should let it lapse or sell it to someone who will maintain it for the community, not turn it into something else.

nknight5• 15 years ago

> the domain is a .org

That has no particular significance. The Big Three TLDs haven't had any special requirements or policies in many years.

> its name is not his but that of the language

The language's name is "Scala", not "scala-tools.org", but let's assume you just think any domain with "scala" in its name is effectively the name "Scala". I have some news for you:

"Scala" is also the name of a typeface, the student chapter of the American Library Association, part of human anatomy, a unit of area, a couple of music albums, a software company with no connection to the programming language, a couple of entertainment venues, two locations, a surname for I-don't-know how many people, and a snail.

> it should belong to the community

A "community" cannot actually own a thing. Who exactly do you think should have the domain? Who represents "the community"? And why exactly does this amorphous "community" have some special claim to one of an infinite number of domains that might be used for similar or entirely different purposes?

soc8816• 15 years ago

This comparison is just deeply flawed.

Point is, he can do whatever he wants, but his actions are solely designed to make the live of everyone else a bit harder, just for the sake of it.

nknight5• 15 years ago

The "keys" in this case are his own property, and any banners he might want to put up are being put up on his own property, so your supposed point makes no sense.

ww5203• 15 years ago

I didn't see he forgot to return the keys (owned by the company). He asked for help to transition it off. No one came, so he just shut it down.

Yes. I can see how everyone's life is a bit harder since he has stopped providing free product and service for them. Well, they had a free ride to begin with.

zak_mc_kracken3• 15 years ago

You are over-dramatizing, and you are doing the exact same thing that the OP said: thinking you can add a "but" to what is a 100% personal decision.

Reread the comment above and take the time to understand it.

ludwigvan• 15 years ago

Why is he leaving Lift and Scala? What does it say about a web framework whose founder is leaving -- does this mean the death of Lift?

jensnockert• 15 years ago

In programming you don't have to be monogamous, you can select another tool for a certain job without implicitly saying that all the stuff you used before was worthless crap.

It does not mean anything, it means at most that he doesn't think it is a silver bullet.

dkhenry3• 15 years ago

Lift really lost traction over the past year. I think he is put off that his project and involvement in the community is being disregarded for other alternatives, seeing his star falling I think he jumped to his next thing ( Haskell and Obj-C apparently )

ww5203• 15 years ago

The ungrateful comments here just strengthen David's point.

NegativeOne• 15 years ago

Seems a bit pretentious saying the domain 'can't be priced' while shutting everything down at the same time. He's gonna take his ball and put it in some closet for eternity, and it sounds like he doesn't really care if anybody else wants to play with it. Yes, this is his 'right', it's also pretty lame.

soc8816• 15 years ago

That's exactly what I'm trying to say. He is leaving his Lift community to do something new and doesn't intend to do the hosting work anymore. That's completely acceptable.

What makes me confused is his determination to prevent anyone else from taking over the service he doesn't want to do anymore and basically forces everyone to rewrite massive amounts of documentation, package names, source code, maven xml files, build files, etc. for no real gain.

denshi• 15 years ago

Scala, isn't that the jvm language for type hipsters?

I don't owe you scala-tools.org

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