Fusion disagrees with Rojo's actions

[dphfox]

Hi all. In advance, I'm deeply sorry to be publicising this meta discussion, but all of us are unfortunately faced with a problem that could have an existential impact on the unity of our fledgling open source community. As the lead maintainer of one of Roblox's most widely used OSS Luau projects, and with an explicit responsibility in extending a helping hand to new members of our community, I must speak out against the recent actions of the Rojo project.

For those unfamiliar with the timeline of events, we won't exhaustively cover the hours and hours of messages, GitHub drama, and RFCs here. I don't believe it is right for you to see that filtered through me here, but I would invite you to look into the Luau RFC repository or relevant Discord channels to see the messages without my suggestion and leading commentary.

However, it has culminated in this. The Rojo project has issued an ultimatum - all Luau projects will adopt the Rojo module standard, or work around Rojo's intentional incompatibility.

The Fusion project rejects this on principle.

The Fusion project has never stood for actions that drive wedges between communities, and here I would like to reiterate our support for keeping the community together. As a large incumbent project, Fusion refuses to allow Rojo to drive a wedge between our community members, whom come from a diverse background along all axes, and rejects the use of the Fusion project as leverage in their personal disputes.

As the Fusion project is home to countless hard-working maintainers and users that value a unified and communal open source ecosystem, I vehemently disagree with their approach. I believe that this was a disproportionate response to the personal grievances of key influential individuals, and that this action was taken unilaterally against the best wishes of the whole Luau community.

In my personal view, individual maintainers with influential status in the Rojo project are now too comfortable exerting a kind of community control that deeply unsettles my faith in their ability to do what's best for the ecosystem at large. The Luau ecosystem deserves no dictators, irrespective of whether they are community or corporate; both are equally dangerous. I maintain this principle.

Towards that end, I will accelerate our interoperability initiatives to ensure that your code is insulated from this change, and continues to work no matter what ecosystem you choose. I believe strongly in the agency of our users to choose how they manage their project and which tools they adopt, and will work diligently to uphold that as long as it is physically possible to. Like we would do with anyone else, the Fusion project will adamantly refuse to release a Rojo-only version of Fusion on principle.

If, after great effort, such time comes that Rojo support becomes infeasible, the involved Fusion maintainers will telegraph this change ahead of time, and work with everyone affected to find the right deprecation timeline to move forward with. I personally will endeavor to avoid this, as this would be massively destructive to our longest-time users.

Fusion will also look to adopt a new steward for package synchronisation long-term as is has become clear that Rojo is explicitly willing to use our ecosystem's health as bargaining capital. I am happy to explore alternative synchronisation solutions that meet our standards for ecosystem portability and interoperability.

Simultaneously, we will be looking to disassociate with any package management solutions that force the use of Rojo as a standard, in favour of other package manager options that allow independent formats. Again, this is something I would be happy to explore with you all, as we have already been discussing the future of Fusion's package management story. In particular, I would like to personally invite pesde as an option to seriously consider. Many have explicitly asked for pesde, and I am willing to go along with this despite personal concerns as it has grown quite popular as an option.

This will not impact your current Fusion workflow. It is an explicit goal to preserve the stability and ongoing maintenance of existing Fusion projects. I will not be pulling Fusion from repositories where it is currently available, and explicitly permit community members to take up unofficial third party initiatives to continue using Fusion in those places. After all, our whole argument is that agency is good - your freedom is more valuable than the maintainer's opinion, and we want to set the right example by practicing that.

Finally, while we have endeavoured to be a minimal-dependency and low-risk project, it is clear that we have not been sufficient in our approach here. I would like to personally apologise again for this inconvenience. I will invest more time in the future towards ensuring that every user of Fusion is well supported and insulated from risks to stability going forward.

To the involved individuals in the Rojo project, I empathise with your dispute, but cannot condone these extreme and plainly undiplomatic intentions. I hope you will do right by your community sooner rater than later. There is no shame in retraction.

I would love to work together again, professionally and in earnest, with the shared mutual goal to further the community as a whole.

But until such time,
Dan