I think this is another story about the destructive power of the internet echo chamber, where the asymmetry of one person vs. a mob of people who are in reality probably not all that engaged with the problem but nevertheless have enough engagement to send a nastygram or two creates a distributed denial of decorum attack that no single human being should be expected to deal with "nicely". Our ancient instinctive tribal signals of whether or not you are approved by the tribe, tuned for tribes of 150 people or so, receive a message that 15,000% of the tribe thinks you are a bad person, and our natural human response to that is a lot of stress at best (our ancient instincts tell us that eviction from the tribe is a bad thing, even though in practical terms eviction from this particular tribe won't be much of a problem at all in the modern world).
(I phrase it this way because I think this is, well, not strictly speaking independent of the question of whether or not the maintainer was guilty or innocent of any particular thing, but because the story is the wild disproportionality of the response you can get on the Internet regardless.)
And absolutely correct in my view. I have been on the receiving end. I have friends who have been on the receiving end. It really is overwhelming to receive that 15,000% signal, nudged along by the dynamics of the rest of the tribe.
I really like that you found a way to cover this aspect.
Then just read the second last paragraph:
> This means, on some level, this situation is over: there will not be a fourth huge actix-web drama. But it’s really left a bad taste in my mouth. It’s unfortunate that a well-known project had soundness issues. It’s unfortunate that the maintainer wasn’t receptive to fixing them. At the same time, I’ve been there: being a maintainer is tough. It’s also unfortunate that there’s this style of response, and kind, and volume. It is true that the situation was dangerous. But did it have to be handled this way? You have to understand a lot of nuance here to even know the main points of the story. One version of this story that will certainly be told is “The Rust community says they’re nice but they will harass you if you use unsafe wrong.” Is that what we want? I, for one, do not. If you’re a part of Rust, you gotta ask yourself: are you happy with this outcome? How did your actions (or lack thereof) contribute to it? Could you have done something better?
See this comment at GitHub: https://github.com/actix/actix-web/issues/5#issuecomment-575... — it also links to a mirror.
That said, pulling the code entirely and deleting issues was a rather immature response.
As a rust user I just don't know what another good alternative is. Warp, maybe? I'm debating about just writing http stuff in Golang due to its robust standard library instead of picking among several fledgling 3rd party http libraries.
What does it say that I wouldn't be surprised one iota if "far, far, far over the line" included death threats? Nobody should be expected to continue to contribute in a community with that kind of vitriol pointed their way.
EDIT: Even if all "far, far, far over the line" means is personal attacks and not death threats, that is still not simply criticism, and it's still far beyond what someone should be expected to endure in the name of "open source".
Can someone familiar with Rust and it’s communities explain from a high level what all this is about?