Here's another analogy:

A homeless person asks for money. You don't give him money but give him some advice. Can the homeless person rightfully criticize you?

You can absolutely criticize choices made by volunteers. I don't think you need to think too deeply about this to imagine situations where few would object to criticizing a volunteer's behavior. An obvious one would be if an open source maintainer willfully included malware/etc. into their project - which, to many people, ignoring glaring security issues is vaguely equivalent.

I obviously don't think vitriol is warranted ever, but criticism obviously is from time-to-time.

what is the relationship of your analogy to this situation? is the maintainer the homeless person in your analogy?

you can criticize all you want as an exercise of your critical thinking faculties but the volunteer is not in anyway obligated to heed the criticism.

"it's my money/time and I'll spend it how I want, which includes burning it"

is the fundamental axiom. Given that that is the foundation what sense would it make to criticize that person for burning the money - it's right there in the premise that they're allowed to!

> what is the relationship of your analogy to this situation? is the maintainer the homeless person in your analogy?

It's your analogy, you tell me.

> you can criticize all you want as an exercise of your critical thinking faculties but the volunteer is not in anyway obligated to heed the criticism.

Nobody said they were. Nobody's trying to punish the maintainer legally. That doesn't mean criticism won't be offered or warranted.

Here's another analogy: You have a right to be a jerk in real life. Nobody's going to physically or legally stop you, barring extreme circumstances. People will still criticize you for being a jerk, as is THEIR right.

in my analogy you're the homeless person and the maintainer is the charitable person. in your analogy the homeless person is getting advice from ...?

>People will still criticize you for being a jerk, as is THEIR right.

completely specious. code in a github repo is not active participation in society. the fact that it's public does not mean it's been submitted for evaluation in any way. criticizing a thing that wasn't critically submitted is meaningless. it's like calling my practice sketches inferior to commissioned pieces - no shit that's the point!

> in my analogy you're the homeless person and the maintainer is the charitable person. in your analogy the homeless person is getting advice from ...?

the maintainer?

> completely specious. code in a github repo is not active participation in society. the fact that it's public does not mean it's been submitted for evaluation in any way. criticizing a think that wasn't critically submitted is meaningless. it's like calling my practice sketches inferior to commissioned pieces - no shit that's the point!

Uh, what? By packaging something as a crate, by listing it on crates.io, you're submitting it to be used. If you don't want it to be used or evaluated, at all, why in the world would you publish something as a crate on a public registry?

This is more like submitting your sketches to a public art gallery and then being upset when the public criticizes it.

>This is more like submitting your sketches to a public art gallery and then being upset when the public criticizes it.

that's not what happened. there weren't simply discussions of the viability or soundness or the crate. there were implicit/explicit demands for changes. so your analogy is wrong again - it would be like submitting public sketches and then facing demands that the sketches be improved. does that sound like something that i as the artist should be comfortable with? more importantly does that sound like something a reasonable person would do (make demands for alterations to sketches submitted to a public art gallery)?

what are you talking about? The code was submitted to be used by the public as a crate on a public registry. There were ABSOLUTELY discussions of the soundness of the crate - that’s literally what sparked this issue, security flaws in the crate.

Are you sure you have a firm grasp on what actually transpired here?

Please edit personal swipes out of your comments here. It evokes flamewar from others, which is what we got in this case.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Fair enough. My apologies.

And people are allowed to criticize his reluctance to accept those vital security patches, because he submitted code packaged as a crate to be used by others on a public registry.

By publishing something to be used by others in a public registry, you are opting in to receive criticism from the public.

Criticism is not the same thing as vitriol and I’m not endorsing the latter even one iota.

Is that not crystal clear to you?

You've broken the site guidelines egregiously in this thread. Since you also have a long history of breaking the HN guidelines, we'd normally ban an account for this, but it has been posting pretty well in recent history, so I won't ban it this time.

Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html though, and stick to the rules from now on.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

you know what would be useful mr. arbiter-of-what's-appropriate? if you would point out exactly what you believe i've done that is "egregious" instead of just vaguely alluding to the guidelines page and leave it up to interpretation/divination/mind-reading. as far as i can tell i've engaged in a good faith discussion/debate and it was solely this other person that shouted/antagonized. the only informal (could be perceived as antagonistic) thing i did was remark on how that person was moving goal posts after i clarified and produced reasoning for my position and how i'm glad that one valuable thing that came out of the exchange was i learned to avoid them in the future. as far as i can tell in the comment chain, it was the other person's that got flagged first and was the source of the tension.

there's something so aggravating about how you preside (note i didn't call it moderation) over these forums. what is the point of a voting system if you can unilaterally censor and censure? you know what the pretense to "objective" and "rational" discourse of this forum does? it inspires the kind of arrogance you see here on so many posts - absolutist positions on everything from tech to healthcare to history. the brand of yc and you and the rhetoric of the guidelines and you all function as an aegis.

For starters, "man i'm glad there are identifying details about you in your profile so i can avoid working with you" is an egregious personal attack, certainly something we'd ban accounts for, especially when they have a history of breaking the site guidelines.

> what is the point of a voting system if you can unilaterally censor and censure?

HN is a constitutional democracy. I can see why you'd find it annoying if you're assuming otherwise. We can't go by upvotes alone—if comments break the site guidelines, it doesn't matter how upvoted they are.

The voting system alone doesn't regulate itself—it leads to flamewars because indignant and unsubstantive comments frequently get upvoted. That's why there need to be countervailing mechanisms like flagging and moderation.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

i would love for you precisely identify what part of

>man i'm glad there are identifying details about you in your profile so i can avoid working with you

is an attack. it's an expression of my personal exasperation. there's literally not a single ascription of any qualities to the other person. you can ctrl+f "you" or "your" in this subtree

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22075698

and i in no place ascribe any qualities to anyone. my only other remark was pointing out the other person's belligerence which i still didn't make personal.

so either you can claim that there's something like a "zero tolerance" policy for antagonism or you can retract what you've accused me of.

this is my overarching point and has been for years on hn: it's evil to paint with a broad brush people that are actually antagonistic and those that don't feel they should toe the line in response to those people. your constitutional moderation is this brush.

> i would love for you precisely identify what part [...] is an attack.

It's basically the same as saying "I hate you". You hate them so much that you will go to great lengths to never work with them.

Maybe it's true—maybe you really do hate them—but stating as much is absolutely a personal attack IMO.

> it's an expression of my personal exasperation.

"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

Sounds good.

I reject the axiom. No one is above criticism provided the criticism is rooted in fact (i.e., defamation is not criticism).

it's not about whether someone is above criticism - it's about whether criticism makes sense in the context of what's being proffered. in another part of this branch of the thread i make the analogy with a an artist's sketch posted to a public art gallery. it's not that you can't criticize, it's that it doesn't make sense to criticize because the artist isn't attempting to achieve anything.

maybe a better analogy is if i play a pickup game of basketball and i get labeled a bad player for not trying my hardest. it's not that the criticism is misplaced it's that it doesn't make sense at all - i wasn't trying to be a good player! i was trying to have fun.

That’s not the issue at all, and we know this because the project was advertised as secure and the critics were arguing that it wasn’t advertised as such. This is characteristically different than your basketball analogy because it is neither explicit nor implicit that the project was unsuitable for production. Drew is arguing that the criticism is invalid because maintainers are within their rights to even lie about their projects because all responsibility lies downstream. Note that security DOES indeed lie downstream, but Drew is mistaken for arguing that this downstream responsibility immunizes maintainers from such criticism. This is a non sequitur.

I don’t understand the desire to make this out to be a sort of dichotomy—both groups have the right to do what they did (the maintainer to reject patches and even allegedly lie about the security properties of his project and the critics to criticize even in bad taste) and both parties could have handled it better. TFA did a fine job for implicitly acknowledging this by simply referring to the situation as sad all around.

>That’s not the issue at all, and we know this because the project was advertised as secure

this is so weird to me. i have a really difficult time on hn often because i don't understand why people that claim to be intelligent can't distill out the fundamental/primary issues.

it's a free/proffered/donation/voluntary/no strings attached piece of code. that is the first thing that defines its use/understanding/existence/ontology whatever other words. everything else is contingent upon that. you can debate this point - you can say something about the social contract of open source software and your responsibility to the community if you yourself have benefited from other open source projects and etc but no one is debating this. everyone is debating aposteriori things.

if i put a mattress out on the street with a sign "no bed bugs" and you pick it up and it has bed bugs in can you be mad at me? can you take action against me?

i don't know what kind of framework i need to appeal to in order to underscore this issue so that people address it directly instead of things further down the line. i would really appreciate someone showing me how to either do this (put the focus on the thing i'm engaging with) or tell me why i'm wrong for focusing on that.

> this is so weird to me. i have a really difficult time on hn often because i don't understand why people that claim to be intelligent can't distill out the fundamental/primary issues.

I feel the same way, but not about /u/weberc2's post.

> it's a free/proffered/donation/voluntary/no strings attached piece of code. that is the first thing that defines its use/understanding/existence/ontology whatever other words. everything else is contingent upon that.

This is another of your own axioms. These aren't universal. In particular, if a maintainer states or otherwise implies that his project is secure and suitable for production and then behaves otherwise, criticism is warranted. Even if he doesn't, criticism is still permissible.

> you can debate this point - you can say something about the social contract of open source software and your responsibility to the community if you yourself have benefited from other open source projects and etc but no one is debating this. everyone is debating aposteriori things.

No one is debating this because it's not necessary. The maintainer's explicit assertions about his project (its security, etc) override implicit "social contract" responsibilities.

> if i put a mattress out on the street with a sign "no bed bugs" and you pick it up and it has bed bugs in can you be mad at me? can you take action against me?

Not sure, but I can certainly criticize you.

> i don't know what kind of framework i need to appeal to in order to underscore this issue so that people address it directly instead of things further down the line. i would really appreciate someone showing me how to either do this (put the focus on the thing i'm engaging with) or tell me why i'm wrong for focusing on that.

In general your arguments are based on your own axioms. If your axioms aren't widely-shared, then you will run into these sorts of disagreements.

>This is another of your own axioms. These aren't universal.

how is this my axiom? it's on github. no one has paid for a license (the license is completely permissive).

>In particular, if a maintainer states or otherwise implies that his project is secure and suitable for production and then behaves otherwise, criticism is warranted.

is that part of the TOS of github? is that part of the bylaws of the guild of software engineers? is that in the bible? where is this codified except in this thread around this issue where everyone is mad?

>Not sure, but I can certainly criticize you.

you can do whatever you want. you can stand on your head and recite the star spangled banner. i'm posing the question whether it's reasonable. is it reasonable to criticize me for putting that mattress there in that state?

>In general your arguments are based on your own axioms

again they're not mine in the least - i did not coin the phrase "don't look a gift horse in the mouth". that is much older than me and fairly universally understood/accepted.

It's your axiom because others don't believe it being on github or free immunizes the maintainer from criticism. Licenses and GitHub ToS have no authority over who may or may not be criticized. You reason that it's not eligible for criticism because you hold the axiom that it is unreasonable to criticize open source projects. The "gift horse" phrase doesn't apply to situations where the "gift" is a liability; i.e., something that could leave you worse off than before--the Trojans would have done well to look their gift horse in the mouth, for example.

Criticizing someone for lying is generally accepted. Criticizing someone for an accidental mistake is often frowned upon.

The trouble is distinguishing the cases.