Status update, July 2022

on captainepoch's log

Howdy!

I would like to start this post by saying a massive “Thank you!” to all the users and collaborators that worked with me while maintaining Husky. It was a great experience working with people willing to take their time to give a helping hand with the project. And a massive recognition to a1batross, the previous maintainer, who did an amazing job with Husky.

That being said, I am out of the Fediverse, possibly, once and for all. People have the problem that they want the stuff done by their way, instead of understanding that FOSS maintainers do that for free, and I do not think taking the effort to send an email while getting software for literally nothing is even a fair price, yet it is the only thing I asked to the users of Husky reporting issues: do it over email.

Husky will need another maintainer. The repository is open for anyone to copy and push it wherever you like.

I am done dealing with entitled people. It is not worth the effort. Maybe I will be back in the future to the Fediverse, maybe not, it is something I did not even think about, but if I do, I will do things differently.

Drew DeVault wrote a post called The Fediverse can be pretty toxic with which I agree. Also, he wrote bleh, reflecting his view of people and the relation with SourceHut and himself. I wrote this post, titled Why did I choose SourceHut?, that contains my reasons for using SourceHut as my preferred Git platform over others.

This, of course, does not mean I am going to stop being active. I will continue contributing to FOSS projects, as far as my spare time allows me. Whether if they will be Android applications or not it still is something I am thinking about.

This post also puts a final in the series Maintaining my first project. This post can be also considered the sixth and final part of those.

For those who come from the Fediverse to read this and want to keep in touch with me, you have all my contact details at adol.pw/contact.

On other news, I deleted all my repositories from GitHub. I am not going to keep hosting any code there (if I contribute to a project there I do not have any alternative). I do not think that GitHub is a Git forge anymore, instead it is a social network. Also, I do not consider GitHub Copilot an ethical tool, trained with our code and not recognizing that the code it writes can be considered a derived work. Lawers called that “suggestions”.

Drew DeVault wrote a good article about GitHub Copilot called GitHub Copilot and open source laundering. You should check it.

I understand that having the code in the open in another Git forges allows Copilot to be trained too. My opinion stands.

Now, I have my code in two places:

I choose to do this like that because people tend to like more a GitHub-like hosting, and thus, they prefer to look at the code in one like that.

The question “But why?” can be answered with this: I find that we should use as many FOSS platforms and FOSS software for FOSS projects as we can. Sometimes we cannot do that (for example, an iOS application can be FOSS, but Xcode and MacOS are not FOSS), but in the extent of our posibilities, we should.

If you are a FOSS programmer, I would recommend to you to take time to think about this kind of stuff, and migrate to Codeberg, a GitHub-like Git hosting, based on Gitea (and with all the code of the platform hosted there).

Drew DeVault wrote an article called It is important for free software to use free software infrastructure. I think it is a good article to understand this point of view from a long time FOSS maintainer.

Outside of the programming stuff, I started to play Minetest. It is a FOSS Minecraft clone turned into a Voxel games engine. It has a ton of mods, and you can create an almost 100% clone of vanilla Minecraft. You should check it out.

That would be all, see you in the next status!

PS.: I quote a lot of articles written by Drew DeVault because I consider him a very good FOSS maintainer with a good knowledge on ethics and issues on those that I do not posses. Plus, I learnt a lot from him when I started with SourceHut, reading his posts at his website and talking with him on IRC.

If you can recommend more blogs from people like Drew, please, send me a link to them, I would love to add them to my RSS reader.