esr wrote: ↑29 May 2021, 20:53
But here's what I see from the outside: Soarer pulled inexcusably careless, risky shit and nobody called him on it. Nobody said "Hey, we could be in legal trouble using those blobs without a license". Nobody said "I'm not cool with using firmware there's no published source for." At least neither of those things happened in any message traffic I've seen, and people here talk like they never happened at all.
Maybe there are people here who know better, and maybe you're one of them. I can easily believe that.
But
nobody called him on it. Your culture didn't have that norm. And that lack is a bug.
Please. Nobody was going to get in legal trouble for using his binaries without a license. It was clear he intended the programs to be freely used. The orihalcon thing was a little odd, and maybe some exposure there due to the commercial nature, but he blessed that as well.
And he was called out for lack of releasing source. Almost immediately when he released 0.99. And those requests continued for years.
Nobody said "I'm not cool with using a binary I don't have the source for" because Soarer wasn't a dick. He was in a community working to solve a problem. He was trusted. Rightly so. But they had to choice to simply not use it.
He had his reasons for not releasing the source initially, and all that is documented. Right up the to days he disappeared he had been discussing the effort.
He chose to produce something and release it out into the world for others to benefit from. But it wasn't curing cancer. It was a something to making using an old keyboard easier, and it wasn't the only one.
To say he did "inexcusably careless, risky shit" is truly the height of assholery.