It would be different even if we didn't "say so".

I don't understand what you're asking, exactly. I didn't say he wasn't allowed, but you're going to get a lot of attention for purging popular things, attention that you don't get if you simply cut back to being "less Online" and shift from huge amounts of time to fifteen minutes a week making an occasional comment and replying to the occasional direct message.

This presupposes that content and ideas are "property". I more subscribe to the idea that once you put content out into the world, it is no longer yours.

(That said, all this chasing and doxing of this poor guy really is disgusting. If nothing else he absolutely has the right to leave and stop actively hosting things he doesn't want to host anymore.)

I don't think anyone is complaining about efforts to rescue and resuscitate the code.

It was his content. But it was also an inconsiderate move.

Lots of people decide to abandon their open-source projects and their personas. They will also arrange a transition if these happen to be popular projects other people depend on.

But hey, there's no mystique in an orderly shutdown. You don't make the news if you do that. Do we know if this was his intention? We don't.

But people usually leave farewell notes. Or a will.

> Why? Because we say so?

Because people were using it, and depending on it.

> It was his content to delete.

A major contributor in a large, active programming community just up and deleted all of his stuff, and you expect people to be just "huh, well, whatever, everything's probably fine."?

Yep. Consider your response in interaction with future major contributors to large, active programming communities. Because people can, and sometimes will, take their marbles and go home if you piss them off enough.

Yeah, exactly. If leftpad and bukkit taught us anything, it’s that contributor licensing agreements are really necessary. Otherwise you’re building your entire edifice on sand.