When that whole rsync stuff came out, I remember arguing with someone about this too.

Like, I'm not defending AI or the use thereof. I also don't know the full details of that situation, or how much AI the dev actually used, or for what. That's not the subject of the argument I was making.

Basically, I was saying that it's a FOSS project and the guy has been maintaining it more or less by himself for decades at this point, and it's become a critical infrastructure that an enormous number of projects (both professional and hobbyist) rely on.

I said if these people didn't like how the guy was maintaining his project (for free, and thanklessly at that), then they could either contribute, fork it, or make their own.

A couple people in that thread were doubling down about how the dev somehow apparently has some sort of responsibility or duty or obligation to run his project the way they think he should. They just didn't seem to get the fact that he's doing it for free, it's his own project, and it's not his fault that the majority of linux users decided to make it an indispensable part of their backup processes.

But these people said everything from "you can't just fork a major project like this, that's an enormous task with xyz responsibilities" (as if that doesn't strengthen the point that it is an enormous task which this guy is choosing to do for free) to "if so much critical infrastructure depends on it, then it does oblige the developer to maintain it in such-and-such a way."

In the end, I didn't get through to them. Not that I expected to, but sometimes arguing with these people is more for the lurkers who will read the chain rather than for the people I'm actually arguing with...