Maintainers don't owe you free work, but critiquing bad engineering practices that are publicly visible is valuable discourse. The dude is a legend but he basically sabotaged the project with irresponsible LLM use.

And I'm definitely not impressed with his blog post trying to deflect by bringing up topics like whether LLMs are intelligent. He says he retired and would rather be sailing? OK go sailing dude. Don't wreck the project and break people's backup systems with your shitty LLM experiments.

If I spend my own time building a rickety wooden bridge across a river and people start using it, I don't owe them anything and I don't have to maintain the bridge.

If I then spend my time reinforcing the rickety bridge to make it more reliable and sturdy, and perhaps wider so it can support small carts and horses, and more people use it, I still don't owe them anything and I don't have to maintain the bridge.

Then perhaps I spend my time turning it into a full concrete/tarmac bridge that can support vehicle traffic and it gets widely adopted so much so that people basically expect to use it in their day to day. I still don't owe them anything, and I still don't have to maintain the bridge.

Then I make some further changes to the bridge by using the "tool that sometimes makes bridges better and sometimes makes it fail without warning", and the people who have come to rely on my bridge start being unable to use it because it randomly drops them into the river. I still don't owe anyone anything. I still don't have to maintain the bridge. But I would certainly think people are justified to complain that I did something quite fucking annoying and potentially harmful.

Sadly, unless you are on the viral side of the open source, all labour of love can and will be used in private for big corp gains, and this I think it’s unfair. But as the author of the text express, “fuck it” you did something expect nothing in return.

Taking a project that works fine and making it actively worse by introducing AI made bugs is imho a valid reason to hard fork. The maintainer might not owe you anything, but it shows very poor judgement to slopify a good project like rsync this way.

The rsync developer has gifted us with positive value for many years. Now he is gifting us with negative value by making his project worse. So in a real sense he gave us what we were owed: he owed us nothing, and he gave us nothing. Net nothing.

In a real sense though, linking this article (from 2018) to the rsync situation misses the point, because backlash like this in the open source world is never about what people believe they are owed. Software users are and have always been entitled, yes, regardless of whether the software in question is open or proprietary. The difference with open source software though is that when a project diverges from what most people want, it can be forked.

The outrage against open source projects going in the wrong direction then, is not outrage that the developer is not giving them what they are owed. Rather it is the anger stage of the grief cycle related to the realisation that there is now lots of work to be done to fork or replace the project.

Why give a gift and then take it back? Is it reasonable to decry the anger and resentment that such an act engenders?

Remember the left-pad incident? Was the developer within their rights to withdraw their work? Yes. Was it a dick move? Yes. Was the anger against them justified? Yes. The rsync situation is analogous. We scream into the void and then we move on.

I feel this article is a bit outdated. Unless you put it into an AGENTS.md file... Contribution has changed a bit since 2018. The coding agents won't abide by those standards for issues and merge requests 😅 The users and contributors, should, though. And double-check, reproduce and understand what their agents do, before sending anything in.

if there is a good way to use ai its to deal with problems from ai.

Yes they don't owe us that. Just as the users don't owe them to have to use the main branch. If they have shown they are no longer fit to maintain, we have to make such information known so users can decide if they want to fork/look for alternatives.

Maintainers signed up to maintain. If they don't maintain, no one owes them kind words and encouragement.