The terms of the funding are attached to the project, not a specific maintainer:
> During the conversation with Ben, he went over the terms and conditions of the Open Collective with me.
> Ben said that simply, "The funding is attached to the project, not the current maintainer."
None of Marak's personal GitHub sponsors were changed (obviously).
To be clear: Marak deleted the original project as part of his protest. The sponsors in question are donating money to sponsor the project, not a single person. It wouldn't make sense to send their money to someone who deleted the project.
Then you cancel the sponsorships to the project and notify the supporters. When the maintainer effectively cancels the project, this makes sense. But you don’t migrate supporters automatically over to a brand new project (even if it is the most stable fork of the original).
> We came to the determination that users unfamiliar with the whole Faker situation wouldn't know that the repository's sponsorship links aren't funding the continued development of the project.
If the intent of the supporters was to support the project, then you can ask them to continue funding the new fork. But you don’t just move funding by default. Cancelling the ongoing support would be fine, but you are relying on people (who were never aware of the switch and the new fork) being okay with this, without their consent.
This is a messy situation, but you can’t make these decisions unilaterally. Inform the supporters and let them decide.
But they are changing the “project”. Just because the new project is named “Faker-JS” doesn’t make it “official”.
Does the open collective have the ability to decide who is in charge of a project? Can they remove maintainers?
Let’s say there is a fork of a different popular project. Are you suggesting that they could they unilaterally decide to support the fork over the original project? However unlikely that is, I don’t think they have that power. Decertifying a project? Sure. Redirecting funding to a new project (even a fork), just isn’t right.
To me, this is like the left-pad incident and npm. There was a vocal minority who denounced npm for looking after the greater good, maintaining continuity and transferring the project to someone else.
In this case, since the author also deleted the project, the proper way to maintain continuity for the sponsors seems to transfer it to the new community of folks who are interested in maintaining the project. Sponsoring the old deleted project does nobody any good.
Personally, I don't see anything wrong with what OC did.
You have to let the supporters make that decision.
You can make that decision easy, you can automate a lot of it, you can inform, but you can’t change which project the funding is going to without explicit consent.
And yes, for these purposes, the new fork should be considered a new project. It is a completely different situation than if the project itself decided to change maintainers, etc.
This is really a crazy situation where the original maintainer blows up the project. The best scenario would be for the original authors to hand over the project in some capacity. But that seems pretty unlikely.
To put it in different terms… this was not a SQL UPDATE. The was a DELETE. You don’t just change foreign keys to a different project_id when you delete a record.
I would also argue that the author was completely irresponsible, and made life difficult for everyone that used and supported the project. But that’s a separate issue and doesn’t make what the open collective decided right.
I don't see how it's immoral. If someone wants to sponsor Marak personally, they can do so easily. If people are donating to the project under the false belief that the money is exclusively going to Marak, then that's their problem for misreading the details of what they were donating to.
The project no longer exists. It was deleted. These people forking it does not give them the ownership of the project. The problem in the supply chain was solved by NPM rolling back the version. Github temporarily suspending his account could be attributed to suspicious behavior. These guys commandeering someone else's open collective and general community identity (hn handle, twitter handle, library name) does not solve any actual problem, and is clearly just an opportunistic way to boost their own standing in the community and financially gain off someone else possibly having a breakdown. Shameless and very unethical.
Saying "the funding is attached to the project" doesn't really answer anything.
This new fakerjs isn't the old project, technically or practically speaking (technically being the important part here).
So funding attached to the old project should be still attached to that now-abandoned fakerjs, or straightly up canceled if Open Collective considers it violates their terms, instead of transferring.
The fact they can't do it themselves and asked Open Collective's exclusive director to do it "manually" basically self-confirmed it shouldn't be done.
> This new fakerjs isn't the old project, technically or practically speaking (technically being the important part here).
No, it's definitely a continuation of the old project.
Marak deleted the old project. It's now just a non-functional GitHub repo with a Readme that says "What really happened with Aaron Swartz?". Nobody would consider that to be more like the original fakerjs than this active fork that, literally, retains the original fakerjs.
> So funding attached to the old project should be still attached to that now-abandoned fakerjs
Not just abandoned. It's deleted. Or at least rendered useless, devoid of history, and non-functional.
Why would they continue funneling money to that? Why would they not give money to the actual project as it continues?
Marak's GitHub sponsors aren't changed. If people wanted to specifically sponsor Marak, they would have chosen to do it there. The Open Collective is very specifically about the project, not a specific person.
> What I don't agree is to transfer its sponsors to an account that has zero relationship with original account.
The current fakerjs has more of a relationships with the original code than what's in Marak's repo.
I don't see the issue. The Open Collective is specifically about sponsoring the project, which Marak clearly and publicly washed his hands of.
Again, they weren't sponsoring Marak. They were sponsoring the project. The project is still going.
Do you also have no issue if GitHub just transfers Marak's repo to the new team? Or all the stars? Since obviously most of people are starring the "project" not him.
I'm trying to use analogy to show the ridiculousness of transferring followers (sponsors) around without agreement of two parties. Hell, I think it makes even less sense in OC's case since there is real money involved.
This is a bullshit excuse. People don't decide to sponsor a project in a vacuum. They look at the project, its history, and the circumstances of its creation. The project is free to begin with, so what is there to sponsor in the first place?
If I make a donation to a charity which I trust, and some third party simply takes the money and hands it over to some other charity instead, claiming that it doesn't matter because the goal is the same, I'd be rightfully outraged. How is this different?
It is up to them to cancel their sponsorship. At most I'd go along with cancelling all sponsorships, but even that would be a huge asshole-move. This is outright theft.
If one single sponsor does not agree with their sponsorship being transferred, then that is THEFT. There's just no way of excusing that.
On the other hand, even if an overwhelming majority were okay with sponsoring the fork instead, cancelling their sponsorship and emailing them about the reason and how they can sponsor the new project (or continue sponsoring the old one, if for whatever reason they'd want that), then that's a minor inconvenience.
Is it really such a hot take that erring on the side of minor inconvenience is better than accepting outright theft based solely on the perception that most™ users will be okay with it?
