These messages are from Daniel Supernault, primary maintainer of Pixelfed.
I don’t want to recap the FediDrama here (drama recaps have a way of becoming drama themselves), but I suspect it’s the reason he’s taking a break.
I’ve never met @dansup but I know he’s contributed so much to the Fediverse and OSS communities. I am still a newb myself (Twexit era). But - for the good of the OSS community - would it be too much to ask we show some respect for the pioneers who got us here?
I get that, and I agree with it in general, but there’s literally no company on earth that would approach open source developers with the intent to pay them to work on a closed source product, or to buy out their open source work without having an NDA in place. Hell, even if Meta just wants to pay them to do open source work to support the community, there will still likely be an NDA covering what they can say to the public about the arrangement or anything they learn from having access to internal systems.
It’s like saying “Meta has security guards at the doors to their datacenters! They must be doing something illegal in there!”
Meta is evil and is very likely doing something bad with these developers, but the NDA isn’t the smoking gun evidence of evil… It’s Meta’s history in general
I don’t think it’s the NDA itself, so much as the tone of the way people framed their announcement of it.
Since I haven’t used a Star Wars analogy in a long time, I’ll try one:
If your babysitter wrote you and told you that they’ve got a meeting with the Galactic Empire to take care of younglings on Coruscant, but they can’t talk to you about it, you’d probably be a little concerned.
Like you know how that ended LAST time, and don’t really have any reason to think that this is somehow different, so you’re probably going to freak out about it.
As with most things in life, if you make announcements, make them super vague, and include things like ‘I’m going to talk to Zuck about his new project, can’t tell you anything’ then you’re leaving it up to the interpretation of the reader.
And so everyone is going to assume whatever based on their biases, and if there’s a group of people who are MORE anti-Facebook biased than Fediverse users, I don’t know who that would be.