I don't think the maintainer is at fault to any degree here. Sure, this could have been avoided if the maintainer refused to be pressured and kept sitting on the project and letting it die, but it's not his fault that he didn't do that, and I wouldn't want that to be the default for maintainers either.
All the pro-social benefits with a side-dish of the nuclear option. That’s coherent I have to admit.
In that case one can limit one’s interactions to other invested parties, i.e. contributors. Granted then you are still interacting with the attacker but you’re spared from the peanut gallery.
In real life volunteering you don’t get random drive-by input from outsiders. The input (and whatever peer pressure) is only from other invested parties.
> I don't think the maintainer is at fault to any degree here.
I’m having a hard time understanding moral arguments. “Fault” and “blame”. Everyone is condemning the peanut gallery for complaining about passing on the maintainer stick to someone else. Yes, including people who say that he could have just “not got peer pressured”. To be clear it’s not about the maintainer having “fault” or the peanut gallery/the attacker being wrong. Both can have “fault” in different ways. Like, clearly the attacker is the one who did something bad. Now there’s only a question of what other people could have done differently.
> Sure, this could have been avoided if the maintainer refused to be pressured and kept sitting on the project and letting it die, but it's not his fault that he didn't do that, and I wouldn't want that to be the default for maintainers either.
The maintainer could have done something different but he didn’t and that’s not his fault. It seems that we all agree that he had a live option. You just want to not associate it with “fault”.
In another comment[1] I asked what moral obligation a maintainer has to herself. Only to herself.[2] Focusing on that angle seems more fruitful than talking about “fault” in the abstract since that just leads to back and forths about whether people should protect their wallets better or whether or not people should just stop pickpocketing people.
The goal of this subthread seems to be about how maintainers might protect themselves (for their own sake) from this kind of thing. Laying out the options that are in their hands (and not just how the world around them should become better) seems pertinent to the issue.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39882721
[2] Like asking about whether someone has a moral obligation to eat healthy. It’s not about other people.
Sure you do: everyone likes to comment on whether your volunteering work is an effective use of time and resources or not.
Peer pressure among adults is far more widespread and powerful than the limited peer pressure among teenagers.
The peanut gallery of non-contributors are only peers in the sense that they pretend to speak on behalf of some OSS community. And the fact that they are spokespersons is by default suspect. The attacker is a peer in the sense of being a contributor. So is he a peer pressurer? Again we come back to the teenager who has to follow the whims of his peers in order to be included. The maintainer is already inside of his own playground. So the pressure to be part of the “community” is really the incredibly abstract thing that the peanut gallery was referring to: you ought to do so-and-so in order to be whatever I think of in my head as an OSS maintainer.
This can be rejected out of hand if you really believe that maintainers don’t owe anyone anything (because of free labor).
But this gets incoherent if you want to assert both of these things:
1. There is no social contract for OSS maintainers: they can toss their PC out of the window and go on a five-year pilgrimage without telling anyone
2. There is some community which has power over the maintainer to peer pressure them
If you really want to double down on (1), the “cure” is what the OP suggested: say no and walk away.