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Comment by commandlinefan | Hacker News Reader

This sort of thing hurts open source, too - when you buy software, the contract is that they'll continue allowing you to use it as long as the check clears. Now, with open source, you don't have to pay... but you have to run your business/government the way each individual developer agrees with?

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Not exactly.

Developers ultimately have judgement over which projects they contribute to, and if they feel that more harm is coming out of their work than good, then they have every right to cease development.

Open source, compared to other development models, suffers the least from this problem in that there is no single developer that has jurisdiction over how the product is used. FOSS projects can always be forked, if need be.

Arguably he did people a service by reminding relying parties of this vulnerability. Both that upstreams might pull their repos, and that upstreams might incompetently run their distribution infrastructure (all the npm issues...)

...yes?

If you want to have availability guarantees you should arrange a paid contract. Otherwise you are literally demanding someone else do free work for you.

I'm going to have to say yes on this one. If you have no contract with the developer, you're SOL.

> when you buy software, the contract is that they'll continue allowing you to use it as long as the check clears

Have you ever actually read a proprietary software license?

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