Why I’m leaving Elm
Over the past year or so, I’ve reluctantly come to the conclusion I need to leave Elm and migrate to some other language (most likely Bucklescript via philip2), and I definitely cannot recommend it to anyone else. This post is about my reasons for that, which are mostly about the way in which the leadership behave.
Elm is a language for web developers. I don’t do much with languages like that, so I’m more interested in the workings of the open source world than the particulars of this story. Some people put many hours into open source projects and then let others use their work. Sometimes that’s a good thing. Others not so much, because it’s not usable, and you don’t know that until you’ve invested a lot of your own time into the project. I really hate it when someone says, “It’s open source, so you don’t have a right to comment.” There are a lot of reasons this is a stupid thing to say:
- Some people benefit from writing open source. They might get paid to write it, they might get a job because of it, they might have a higher profile because of it. Nobody’s ever been forced to release software under an open source license. They had some benefit in mind when they did so.
- Just because you’ve used a particular license doesn’t mean you have a right to put crap out there and then tell users where to go if it doesn’t work. Similarly, you don’t have a right to break software for your own purposes (I know, it’s fun to break software to fix design mistakes) once you have a big userbase. There’s more to it than just “It’s my project, I can do what I want.” Once others have invested in the project, it belongs to the community, and you should fork the project if you want to break things for your own purposes.
- Bad actors give open source in general a bad name. Every unstable, unusable project and every unprofessional open source developer damages the reputation of all open source. The world is better off if you don’t release your software under an open source license if you’re not willing to maintain some minimum standards of decency. When people post intentionally misleading videos on youtube, we don’t dismiss it by saying “Well, they released the video for free, so take it or leave it.” Those videos do get pulled down, and for good reason.