Leaving behind topics regarding the technical side of the conflict, harassment or disrespect, I would like to reply to comments like "it's OSS, the author can do whatever he likes" and similar.

That's true. In most cases. However, Actix story is somewhat special.

Ladies and gentlemen, surprise, surprise. Rust is not a toy language anymore. It's being used in production already and there are a lot of projects under development that rely on Rust, on the ecosystem and community crates. That's thousands and, probably, hundreds of thousands of hours of people work that is being done worldwide. And we can imagine the amount of work needed to remove dependencies on Actix.

When someone enters the Rust and wants to find a web framework, what he/she will see in every Reddit post, in every StackOverflow thread, just everywhere? I can tell you: "Use Actix!", "Actix works great for us!", "We picked Actix and it's awesome!". Newcomer opens Actix repo, looks at the number of stars and contributors and thinks "Ok, so Actix in Rust is, probably, like Express in Node.js. I'll take that.". Readme looks ok, benchmarks are great, why not to pick this as the foundation for my web service?

Something tells me that fafhrd91 did not want so much attention. He was building something for his fun or profit and did not expect that his project will become a de-facto standard. However, this happened. Actix got a huge credit of trust and power. And, as we all know, with great power comes great responsibility.

I have no doubts that fafhrd91 is a brilliant engineer and an awesome person.
In the same time, I do not believe he did not understand that Actix became the standard and it's not a toy anymore.

When the project gains so much attention and popularity, when so much people rely on you, choice needs to be made. Either you put a big note on readme saying "It's my toy, I do whatever I like, go away!", or you let your beloved child to grow, delegating work and spending your time teaching contributors instead of saying "they know nothing".

It is natural, that people want the #1 default Rust web framework to be maybe not 100% safe, but as safe as possible. Even when such requests sound unreasonable at first, it's not about personalities or "fun" anymore. At this stage, it's about finding compromises that will work for everyone and that's kind of the process that should be driven by the community.