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> As a "new" maintainer myself - how do you decide when to ban someone?

When I want to. I like to describe it using the amusing language from a generic cardholder agreement.

At any time, at my sole discretion, I may ban you from any of my projects; for any reason, or for no reason at all.

My projects exist because I enjoy working on them. My continued enjoyment is the most important aspect to the health and survival of any project. You don't owe anyone anything, you're allowed to donate your work to others, and also enjoy the privilege of setting whatever arbitrary rules you want to make sure you enjoy your time.

Imagine you're running a free ice cream shop. Some random asshole walks in and starts verbally abusing your best employee who has done nothing but try to help. At what point do you kick them out because your employee is more important and worth more.

You should stick up for yourself, I would.

You can't be an asshole to an LLM. They can feel offended.

You don't even have to merge stuff from a human. I've been contributing a bluetooth driver to a certain embedded project which I use. I put a lot of work into it. The fellas have not merged it yet -- they have limited attention and for whatever reason their priorities and mine are not aligned at this moment.

Would I like it to be merged? Sure would, it would stroke my ego, and I would not have to deal with any merge conflicts with whatever else they're cooking up. Does that mean they must merge it? Sure doesn't. They didn't make me any promises. For the time being, I can just use my fork.

> Imagine you're running a free ice cream shop

Many open-source projects aren't passion projects run for pleasure. Think of it more like ice cream shops sharing recipes, or sharing in the work of running the factory. They just can't kick people out willy-nilly.

I would say most open-source projects are passion projects run for pleasure.