I saw an issue today on a fairly popular project (better-auth, see the link to the issue attached). No repro, no context, just a wall of caps and profanity ending in “fuck you”. The maintainers ship this for free. People run production businesses on top of it, for free. And the thanks is someone raging into a text box because a minor bump cost them an afternoon.
I maintain and contribute to a few projects myself, so this hits a nerve a bit. Something people don’t see from the outside: it’s not enough to know how to build the thing. You also have to know how to defuse a thread where someone’s insulting you and not fire back, even though most of us aren’t paid for any of it, let alone the work of staying civil while being told to get fucked.
I’m not pretending breaking changes don’t cause real pain (that’s what the issue is about). But I keep coming back to a boundary question: if you’re not paying for it, do you actually get to demand anything? (Obviously yes, but we still need some boundaries)
I say thanks to open source maintainers all the time! 😄
Anyway, while a wall of profanity and fuck you is clearly not ok, I do disagree with this:
Just because you offer something for free doesn’t absolve you of all moral responsibility. I’m not saying you have a lot of responsibility, but “it’s free so you can’t complain!” is pure nonsense.
Go and give some kids free poisoned sweets and see how far that gets you.
How is that even remotely comparable
It wasn’t meant to be comparable. It was meant to be a simple counter example to disprove “free => no obligations”.
I can’t think of a single analogous action in providing software for use for free aside from injecting malware, which I’m pretty sure is criminal? No?
I wouldn’t call “not intentionally being malicious” a responsibility anymore than following any laws is a real responsibility… responsibility here implies an active duty to do something, not really to not commit crimes. I really can’t think of any active responsibility any dev has for software they’ve put out there. It could literally cause harm to some hardware and they still really wouldn’t have a responsibility for anything as long as it isn’t (in fact that’s for good reason a common disclaimer for things that tweak hardware).
What did you have in mind as responsibilities a dev has?
See my other comment.
“Not doing an illegal thing” isn’t really an obligation in a sense anyone would understand that statement, but OK.
From the license:
An open source dev is owed nothing and owes nothing.
By stating otherwise, you are trying to say that the person who releases something, on their own time and expense for free and probably fun, has an obligation to conduct themselves in a manner you think is best.
But… They don’t. This isn’t even really a debate worth having, because there’s nothing to debate. You’re just wrong.
I said morally, not legally.
And you’re still wrong. They don’t owe anything to anyone, legally or morally.
I disagree. If you make a project, put it out there for.people to use, and it becomes popular, you have some moral obligation not to dick over people who have come to depend on you. I’m not saying you have a moral obligation to e.g. provide free support forever or work weekends or whatever.
You can think otherwise but IMO that makes you a bit of a dick.
What arbitrary line of popularity suddenly requires me to support every use-case, by never breaking something in a project nobody is paying me to build?
10 people? 100? 100,000?
The answer is: none because the premise is false.
FOSS maintainers owe you NOTHING. Nada. Zip. That includes a working copy of the software, and you agreed to that stipulation in the license. That’s what “no warranty of fitness any purpose” means.
That includes not owing you any specific method of project “governance” or versioning scheme, it includes not owing you releases, ever.
Also, what counts as “dicking over” a user? That sounds arbitrary too.
FOSS maintainers have no obligations to you. None. No arbitrary line of popularity changes that.
I build my open source projects for fun and for free. Your decision to use what my fun produces doesn’t suddenly require me to have my fun in a specific way. It doesn’t obligate me to ensure the output of my fun never breaks your production environment.
Not what I said at all.
Oh so it’s either “nothing. Nada. Zip.” or “support every use-case”. Nice false dichotomy you’ve got there.
I may have been hyperbolic, but my point is that the dichotomy is between:
FOSS maintainers have no obligations at all. Moral or otherwise.
Well I disagree. If you create a popular project, and then are a complete dick about reasonable requests, then that seems like an immoral thing to do to me.
Of course you’re allowed to say “sorry I don’t have time to work on this any more”, or “I don’t think this feature belongs in this project” or whatever. Totally fine. But there are still behaviours that IMO are not ok. For example if Homebrew decided to inject donation request code into every package it installs. Or if ffmpeg added code that detected porn and refused to decode it.
“BuT iTs FrEe! They can legally do what they like!” Sure, but it still makes them a dick.