Comment by justabystander | Hacker News Reader

Comment by justabystander | Hacker News Reader

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> but chrisaljoudi just continued development and made some changes

Yeah, there's more to it than that. Gorhill started it as a free and non-profit solution to help. He gave a lot of the credit to people maintaining the block lists. When he got tired of dealing with it, he transferred maintainership over to one of the devs that showed interest - chrisaljoudi. Who promptly started to monetize it. Like how he stripped out the "No donations sought" part of the readme (https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock/commit/f256801344a517...). And many of his changes were done to make his own contributions seem far larger than they actually were in order to encourage donations.

The majority of chrisaljoudi's changes are churn to make the project look busier than it actually is. For example, many changes are just committing checksum updates (https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock/commit/bb340ac92cc6a8...). Which is already done internally from uBlock. And then there's the removal of other developer's attribution. Which he thankfully stopped after everything blew up. Or his personal site which initially gave the impression that he was the sole creator of uBlock. There was a lot of online drama following it after the maintainership was newly transferred (http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/33sl39/maintain...). I know Reddit's not really an unbiased place from which to review, but there's plenty of links on there.

I'm sorry, but people who ignore the contributions of others and immediately scramble for donations (https://donorbox.org/ublock) the moment they're made lead maintainer don't really give me a good impression. There's been a lot of discussion over the inflated amounts of those donations (http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/39quzj/chris_aljoudis...). He's cleaned up a lot of the problems people complained about, but it doesn't change the fact that his first priority upon receiving a position of authority in a large, free, open-source project was to strip out attributions and solicit donations. I'll give him credit for backpedaling and reforming, but not much. It's easy to apologize when you got caught.

Sorry, but that looks an awful lot like bad-mouthed rumours I don't like at all. https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock mentions gorhill and ublock origin in a positive way and asking for donations is totally fine - it would've been a bit strange if that was the first thing he did after getting the project, in an extensive way, but I did not see that while using the extension. Can't have been too bad. Seeking for donations is especially a good idea since the original developer left the project because it was too much work -> counteract that work with money.

And I saw the offers to give back the project, which does not fit at all to the negative image projected here.

The donations sought are maybe a bit high (which only harms him, since less people might donate), and the one thing that I also don't like. But even that is nothing really bad, setting the current author is what needed to be done, and finding a proper representation of the original author could be in another commit.

There were big expectations that ublock would be totally great, than gorhill left and the new developer (who acted not in a good way to prevent that) got the fallout of the betrayed expectations. And how gorhill acted did not help at all.

> looks an awful lot like bad-mouthed rumours

Really? So if we look at the Git repo commit history, we'll see the transition commit on April 1st (https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock/commit/bc4b7fc4ea17c8...). I'm pretty sure we can consider his first commit as demonstrating his intentions if it departs significantly from previous project direction. And it does - the very first commit after the transition was to start soliciting donations (https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock/commit/f256801344a517...). Git repositories have some reviewable history to them, but I guess that's all just rumours, right?

> Seeking for donations is especially a good idea since the original developer left the project because it was too much work -> counteract that work with money.

Perhaps. But in that same flurry of commits on his first day of project ownership, he linked to a personal donation account (https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock/commit/31a4a522814f06...). All that's said on that page (https://gratipay.com/~chrisaljoudi/) is that he works on uBlock. Part of the drama was that it previously implied more than just working on it - it was his. His wording has since given more recognition to the contributions of others, thankfully. But Day 1 - he's looking for donations, and its his project. Perhaps not terrible on any other day. But taking an open and free project, slapping personal donation buttons all over it, and removing attribution from other developers by manually committing changes (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9449876) - this behavior turned a lot of people off to his project and leadership. He's since talked about sharing those donations, which I think is good. I still think it would be better to not solicit them, but I don't personally value his contributions that highly any more. That's probably my own bias.

> https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock mentions gorhill and ublock origin in a positive way

Those changes are more recent, and came after a lot of public criticism. We can see from the commits that those came in a month and a half after the transition (https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock/commit/823778274bfd47...). Roughly 2-3 weeks after the video you linked. His first approach was publicity, and then he took a less aggressive approach. Let's not whitewash things when commit history shows that it's only 19 commits back (three of those from other people) from the current mainline on Jun 7th. Normal procedure when taking over project maintainership is to maintain - not reinvent the image for donations.

I personally think he saw the opportunity to get some cash for not a whole lot of work, which is a really attractive offer as a high school student. I don't think it was malicious, but I also don't think it was appropriate behavior to take something that was created for free to help others and personally monetize it the moment you got some authority over it. He found out that these things are considered unethical and changed. That's good - and we don't have to lynch him. High school kids do dumber things, and there's still room to learn and grow. But they're not rumours - these things actually happened.

There's a reason people prefer the the gorhill fork. I don't think Ajouldi's a bad kid, but I don't fault people for not trusting him after his very public missteps. I think he'll do much better things in the future - and I think part of that is him directly experiencing the fallout of a poor decision before he's gotten a career that could be affected by it. I won't crucify him, but I won't pretend he never did anything wrong just because he apologized.

> And then there's the removal of other developer's attribution. Which he thankfully stopped after everything blew up. Or his personal site which initially gave the impression that he was the sole creator of uBlock.

https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock/commit/6850fa0a262b87...

> Can you remove me as collaborator of the project please? Thanks.

> @chrisaljoudi Remove me too from collaborators, please.

They asked for it.

No, it wasn't about removing contributors. It was about developer attribution - directly importing changes from others so they looked like his own commits. Inflating his personal contributions in a very un-Github style.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9449876

Everyone's mostly convinced that he did it because he's young and didn't think it through. We shouldn't lynch the kid - he's learned his lesson. But it's still understandable that people would prefer the original developer's version.

Which is why I posted my rebuttal.

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