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 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.