Sorry if this is off topic, I don’t mean to stir a shitstorm. I just seem to hear barbs about Pixelfed developer dansup’s online behaviour every now and then, but no one ever comes out and make clear what the trouble is.
I guess it’s a legitimate complaint that he holds out on open sourcing projects, and keeps them close to his chest rather than distributing workloads. Given he’s currently developing Pixelfed and Loops and a messenger called Sup, I can understand the worry that he’ll hit a figurative wall and take all projects down with him…
So I found this open letter just now as I were trying to get to the bottom of it, and I genuinely can’t tell if this is what people have been growling about?
The above link is to the “appendix” where the anonymous authors appear to show receipts for the behaviour they flag. In shorter form, from the letter itself:
dansup, the maintainer of Pixelfed, Loops (which NLnet helps fund), and FediDB, among others, is a dangerous force in the fediverse community. With a follower count of over 22 thousand, he has repeatedly shown himself to be hostile to fellow FOSS fediverse developers, have a lack of care for open-sourcing his work, and be in favour of injecting the fediverse with advertisements. He has also proved himself to be prone to conspiratorial thinking, regrettable public statements, and embarrassingly public meltdowns.
Somebody tell me what is going on here?
[edited for typos]
Dansup absolutely suffers from the instinct of not open sourcing stuff until it’s fairly late in the stage of being an MVP, but I think that’s largely because he’s learning these technologies as he goes and is afraid of criticism on that front. Personally, however, I do not think it is the case that he does not believe in the Open Source project. I also trust him when he says he’s working towards a nonprofit to distribute the load. It seems his first steps are to get funding via kickstarter to quit his job, and then I imagine organizing a nonprofit structure is next.