Everything else is simply noise.
Once you make your software free, it isn't yours any longer and your opinions about it (or what others do with it) aren't relevant.
On the non-legal side, there’s still a much broader issue of being good members of a community. We do, in fact, live in a society.
While it's technically true that a free software author owes nothing to any of their users, it's a legitimate problem that there's no good way to selectively offer help and support to those getting the software directly but not to those getting it from a package.
I don't know when precisely that stopped happening. Perhaps when OSS became more commonly hosted on sites like GitHub that have more easily-approachable issue trackers, users became more savvy about talking to upstream directly.
"As the author of the package that is being re-packaged here. I'm against it being repacked into here. While licensing wise I cannot stop you, I do hope you can honor my request.
Thank you for considering respecting the author's wishes."
It seems more like a matter of respect than a matter of law.
You can't demand respect from the Nix folks after disrespecting them by telling them to do something "just because".
The project could have pinned the version and downloaded from pypi rather than repackaging.
This isn’t a situation of “can do” it was “is it nice to do.”
And the author mentioned that he’s changing the license to prevent it so it no longer becomes possible legally.
I typically don’t like authors demanding stuff outside their license, but this started as a simple technical/community request to not do something dumb and escalated.
It couldn't, since Nix is a package manager and will only download things from its repository. It can't access the internet otherwise.
Just because you're legally entitled to be a pain doesn't mean this leads to good things. If the source owner has a polite request, honoring that is usually the best course of action, independent of what the law says. (Ask people who thought image hotlinking was OK even against requests, and how goatse looked on their page)
"It's legal" doesn't mean that it's decent behavior.
But he cannot retroactively remove MIT license. Changing license will only affect newer versions afterwards.
> If the source owner has a polite request
If this is your definition of polite so be it. I think it's quite unfriendly. Asked for a valid reason he basically says "because I want it".
If he want's them to remove it even though they have the right to use it he should at least explain why (or not publish MIT in the first place). His only argument is that he will get support requests, but he could just ignore them...
I'm not exactly sure who's being a "pain" in this case outside of the potential future concern that someone might wrongly blame him for package failures via nixos which is packaging it as an upstream dependency of home-automation.
I think I'd be more concerned about the latter's users!
