What an entitled and dumb twat. I guess he didn't think it through that the guy maintaining it now doesn't have some magical ability to tell who would be a good new owner and "handing over the mainline" to any one person could screw people more than any AI changes because that new person might be malicious or neglectful.

Forks need to earn trust and it's best that that step isn't skipped by some inheritance. Not that there even is any obligation to hand it off no matter how many people rely on it or complain.

And the comparison with ms or Google was dumb because I didn't expect them to do it the way I wanted and stopped using what I could to get away from where they were going and any expectation that they hand over their projects to someone else would be ridiculous (and Google open source projects have been forked).

I mean I understand the reasoning behind the problem with "x is mainline": distros.

Most software at the utility level rsync sits at, reaches final users (the ones who complain) not by direct download, but by being aggregated by distros. And unfortunately even highly respected distros like Debian have decided to accept AI in rsync even with the resulting data loss.

I was warned beforehand enough that I pinned rsync in 3.4.1 while it still was in my system, and it will remain so for the short term while I wait for this whole thing to settle down amicably.