I tried to stay out of this discussion, since it seems pointless, but stakes are too high so... On Sun, Aug 24, 2025 at 3:38 PM Christian Mazakas via Boost < boost@lists.boost.org> wrote:
See, I think this is the wrong takeaway.
People are always bound to miscommunicate, emotions get high, etc.
I think turning around and saying, "I just shouldn't participate" is the wrong takeaway from all of this. Just walk it off.
When emotions run high, that’s a reason to step back before posting, not to flood the mailing list with rants. Expert time is precious. For example I am sure that Jonathan Wakely has infinite amount of tasks to do, and for people to waste his time with random rants is not productive. So no I do not accept that people can behave inappropriately on the ML even ignoring the fact that polite communication should be mandated. When quality of discussion drops it is more likely people will stop reading. So although I know 99.9% I will be ignored here is my suggestion: Instead of reading Chris mind and guessing Alliance could have asked Chris and offered to provide funding, e.g. 1. If Chris does not have enough time to do all the work on ASIO due to his regular work it would probably more effective to hire him to work on lower priority issues, than to deal with the fork. This depends on the fact that Chris would be willing to hired, many people find their OS work relaxation from work and would not accept this setup, but you could have asked before asking ML about forking. 2. If Chris does not want to accept commits from others because he fears contamination/legal issues you could have talked to Chris if there is any way to solve this, e.g. if a person committing code signed a contract with Alliance and guarantees all code committed is his own work, not copied from some GPL source. 3. If Chris trust some contributors enough to prune/prioritize issues/PRs Alliance could have offered to fund that so Chris throughput is increased. I do not know Chris so maybe he would have rejected all proposals(Googling I learned that Chris rejected to be hired by Alliance 8 years ago, kind of shows the quality of discussion here: almost 100 messages and I had to Google this)... but I have seen no proof of this, just people guessing. Additionally I think the demands you place on Chris are unreasonable. He maintains ASIO for 10+ years. Sure he could do more. But you know who could also do more? Tens/hundreds of people who are experts in same areas as Chris, but do not participate in Boost or open source at all. Maybe framing it like this will help you understand how much Chris work did for free for the C++/Boost. It is hard to estimate impact of certain library since we do not know alternative timeline(would somebody came up with ASIO like library few months later if Chris did not) but I would not be surprised if Chris work resulted in hundreds of millions or even billions in savings for all the users of ASIO who got a much better library(with documentation) compared to what they would get if they did it themselves. To be clear: I understand the frustration that ASIO seems understaffed (and I think most people here agree it could move faster). But forking looks like the worst way forward. A better option is to ask Chris what kind of support he would actually accept, instead of endlessly speculating. In unlikely case Chris reads this I would ask him to just consider that maybe ASIO became too big of a project to be maintained by just 1 person, even if that person is extremely talented. P.S. I could go more deeply why some of speculation about Chris motivations does not make sense, but as I consider that kind of discussions pointless I do not want to add to this useless direction.