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I am I very much in the ‘it’s their project and they can do what they want with it’ camp, BUT the way they handled it was absolutely awful. Total radio silence until a comment:

> At this point, I see them as doing us a favor by keeping the PR open because that enables us to easily find this code which we can then use to bake our own Docker images.

Then swoop in to close and lock the PR. Again, it’s their project- but surely there was a better course of action…. it probably starts with not ignoring the PR for months. What were they doing? Clearly they had eyes on it… just wishing it would disappear of its own accord?

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> just wishing it would disappear of its own accord?

Almost certainly. I see people sometimes closing PRs when they get no response from project maintainers. They must have hoped that would happen. Or at least that it would stay open and mostly unnoticed, avoiding this sort of negative publicity.

They are running a large project and are likely getting notifications from Github all day every day.

Rather than having purposely ignored it, someone may have looked at it and thought “hmm we’ll have to discuss this” but since people are busy it never got prioritized because it wasn’t urgent. There may be a queue of 25 other prs/issues/discussions that also need a response.

Sure it’s better from a community and support perspective to respond quickly and be transparent, but I wouldn’t necessarily assume there is some ulterior motive to their lack of response.

> There may be a queue of 25 other prs/issues/discussions that also need a response.

There are 30 open PRs. No other open PR has more than 2 thumbs ups/hearts. This one was open for months.

There's zero chance they were unaware of it.

They may have thought "ugh that's awkward; let's not think about it", but that falls firmly into "hoping that nothing happens".

Thumbs up and hearts produce no notifications afaik so they could easily be unaware if they weren’t specifically following and checking up on the thread. And a PR being open for a long time could be an indication that it has been forgotten about rather than being purposefully ignored.

You could definitely be right but you are also making some big assumptions imo that may not be true.

It has quite a few comments too. You get notifications for those. I'm sorry but there's no chance they didn't notice this. And they didn't even try and use that excuse!

Notifications which are often ignored. In a large project, emails from Github frequently aren’t even going to be opened by anyone.

In fact, you have no idea and are confidently speculating about something which you have no way of knowing. But don’t let that stop you I guess.

But the code is still there and we still can build Docker images of it. The PR itself is still searchable, both internally and externally.

Right, it’s still all there. It just leaves a bad impression behind for absolutely no reason. It seems like there would have been a better way to achieve the same results. This is way outside my wheelhouse but something like:

Thanks for the PR, it’s clear you spent a time on it. We already support this on example.com- so I’m going to close this PR as a dupe. Next time, please feel free to start a conversation with us prior to starting any large PRs and we can make sure to align on goals.

Same end result- gives people a link to your SASS offering and doesn’t leave a hostile impression behind. It costs nothing to be nice.

So they can merge/not merge but they aren't allowed to talk/not talk? Just because I have an inbox doesn't mean I have to respond to everything that shows up in it.

They’re allowed to do whatever they want. Doesn’t mean that they weren’t shitty about it.

I never said they were not ‘allowed’ to do anything, I also never said they ‘had’ to do anything. It’s their project and can handle it as they wish- I thought I was pretty clear on that point.

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