This reminds me ...

Posted Mar 14, 2025 0:49 UTC (Fri) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330)
Parent article: New terms of service for PyPI

... of our discussion when we formulating the rules for egcs. When could we ban someone from the community? Should we be able to? Should we have a specific set of rules, or just require a supermajority of the steering committee? We would up deciding that anyone can be banned by a 3/4 vote from the steering committee. When a few people complained, I replied that we didn't want to be stuck if someone found a new and creative way to cause damage.

It turns out that we only ever banned one person (in the time that egcs was independent, before it was re-merged with FSF gcc). The reason was that after his patches were repeatedly declined, he started threatening the release manager, in private mail, up to and including "I know where you live". Those who only saw his behavior on-list might find him annoying and argumentative but not much worse than some others. Fortunately after he was banned, he appeared to back off, so as far as I know law enforcement was never involved.

So yes, I can see why PSF may feel that they need to reserve the right to do what's needed for self-preservation.

This reminds me ...

Posted Mar 19, 2025 10:42 UTC (Wed) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link] (1 responses)

Yes.

On the other hand, I would argue that the stake are much higher. Being banned from Pip can have real life consequence. I would not like to invest in a language where I can be banned from the de facto canonical archive, and where there are strong expectation of software being available there.
That is the contradiction : one set up an archive with the stated purpose that everything will be available there,
and then suddenly there is an "except".

One feature of free software is that we avoid having power over other people, because they can just fork or ignore us.
Centralization effort like canonical package archive create power structures that are dangerous.
Centralization is a costly convenience.

This reminds me ...

Posted Mar 19, 2025 12:59 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Would I be correct in thinking you could be banned from Pip simply cause of things outside of your control - like where you were born and live?