This is a long story, with a lot of events that ended up creating the current state of Dirigeants: silent, dead, and unable to be maintained all due to AoDude (known as bdistin on GitHub) being power hungry, and not to mention selfish.
Around July 23rd, it all started when AoDude kicked Kyra for pinging him that his bot went offline. Thus, Kyra lost his Developer (and Admin) role, the former being given back once Kyra rejoined, however a reason behind the kick was never actually given. Around that day, we started drafting a formal letter, informing AoDude that due to his repeated violations of his own Code of Conduct, he will lose the ownership status on the GitHub organization, and unless he respects the terms mentioned in the letter, he'll lose the membership status as well.
Another one of Ao's actions was to ban Kyra over "breaking copyright", and filing an unofficial DMCA takedown request to Kyra's work-in-progress framework. The issue is publicly available here: sapphiredev/framework#8, and was locked in order to archive it.
DMCA requests are meant to be taken through GitHub's own portal, not via invalid, inaccurate issues. Furthermore, we did NOT breach the license terms, per the following quote from the MIT license:
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software.
We were missing the copyright notice at the top, which we simply forgot, and this should've been resolved with a kind, private conversation. Instead, AoDude decided an invalid DMCA request would be better, hurting the already damaged relationships even more.
Once the drafted letter was done, on July 25th, 2020 I (vladfrangu) sent it in the general-coding channel. The letter is available here: https://gist.github.com/vladfrangu/8307e42730826d6ced4881f0ebe330b2
We recommend you read it as it goes more in-depth with exactly what happened and why actions were taken.
Due to this, AoDude decided that I was just stirring up drama, and banned me from the Discord server, instead of at least reading the letter and doing the little things it asked him to do.
The remainder of that discussion is visible here:
Per the terms, he was removed from the organization. A few days later, I get a DM from him asking for my full name and address (which I kindly refused to give out). Supposedly, he was with a lawyer, drafting a Cease and Desist over this, however as it progressed it was visible he was bluffing at best, and we believe there was no lawyer to begin with.
I've asked for evidence to hold up his claims, which they actively avoided doing, I asked twice to move the conversation from AoDude's Discord DMs with me to signed emails (which is normal in legal affairs and should've been done from the get-go) which was ignored and/or outright refused through ignorance. I asked kindly for the supposed lawyer's registration number or lawfirm they worked for, and also received none of this information.
There were also claims that "Dirigeants" exists as a legal entity outside of GitHub or Discord; another blatant lie. We've checked Kansas' (the state in which AoDude lives, which is listed publicly) records, and no company with the name Dirigeants exists as a registered entity, nor any company in AoDude's name (Ben Distin, which is also listed publicly). That said, should Dirigeants actually exist as a legal entity, we were never aware of it nor have we ever signed a contract of sorts. Registering it under a different name would be void when it comes to Dirigeants, and registering it under a different personal identity is out right illegal.
The whole trascript of this conversation exists, however, to respect AoDude's privacy, I will refrain from making it public unless strictly needed or requested by the community at large.
After a long conversation, I was tired of talking to a brick wall. I offered to add him back and leave the organization, provided any code commited by a list of people is removed and never reused. Sadly, this ended up being a Git nightmare, and I decided to straight up abandon that idea, blocking AoDude.
Lastly, I've open communication channels several times for AoDude (specifically and now only via emails), but none were ever used. Not to mention, an overseas Cease and Desist is not going to be something any lawyer will partake in, and I'm not giving out my full information anyway. Still, a Cease and Desist for this is overkill at best, and if AoDude would've just admitted he fucked up and took steps to improve himself, we wouldn't be here right now.
As it stands, Klasa and all Dirigeants projects are unable to be maintained due to a power hungry ex-Core Developer, and we are sorry. We recommend searching for a new framework, although you may use Klasa at your own risk, as we cannot provide any support or push any bug fixes.
We've started working on a project of our own that will replace Klasa in our own bots called Sapphire. If you'd like you can give it a shot, however you are by no means required to.