
PyTorch Should Be Copyleft - keithcu2
http://keithcu.com/wordpress/?p=3847
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Tomte
You come off as very unsympathetic.

License change request are never something maintainers are looking forwared
to, but your first mail was at least on point and factual.

The following is certainly not a charitable view of what you've written, but
this view is defensible, and you should really change the way you approach
people.

You start by questioning their right to make that decision and their personal
standing ('When you say “we”, are you talking about Facebook or the random
smaller contributors?').

You pretty much attack them ('I hope you realize you could be biased.' – and
no, "could" doesn't make the recipient read it more charitably).

You call them idiots ('At the same time, you should know ').

You helpfully point out that their baby isn't really theirs, but belongs to
humanity everafter ('You won’t be there forever').

You order them to give you more fodder to attack them ('When you say
“thought”, have you written any of it down').

Because you really want to try to start a shit storm ('I may quote your non-
defense').

You accuse them of wasting your time ('I just spend several minutes looking')

Another attack ('Your last dismissive answer'), followed by an open threat
('create a copyleft fork').

They were visibly pissed, but replied nonetheless, albeit very short (that's a
clue!).

Now it gets better!

You don't even know them ('It don’t know any of these names:' / 'I don’t know
who the authors are of this project'). Obviously they should just roll over.

Then the exposure theory that all artists so dearly love ('relicensing would
get you plenty of news articles'). Of course, I haven't ever dabbled in ML,
but even I know the name PyTorch. Clearly they need another news article to
take off.

The rest of your mail was actually quite okay, but still feels like nagging.

I also have my problems with effectively communicating, but really, you should
run mails like these by someone else before sending them.

~~~
keithcu2
I didn't question his right to make a decision, I just wanted to know who was
involved.

It isn't an attack to remind someone they might be biased.

It's not a threat as I have no interest in getting involved with a PyTorch
fork.

I didn't order to give more information, I asked. I want to quote him and his
first answer didn't give very much info.

I didn't accuse him of wasting my time by saying I spent several minutes
looking. I just wanted to make it clear that I wasn't being lazy and wasn't
able to find any public information on how PyTorch came to be lax.

I didn't say they should roll over. My point is that I don't know if this is
an effort built by a small group who have done most of the work and want to
keep it a lax license, or if this is a codebase that has a large community of
random people who might want that protection.

You might know of PyTorch, but tons of people don't compared to Google's
Tensorflow.

Thanks for the tips!

