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Comment by teddyh | Hacker News Reader

> These kind of entitled attitude

If you offer code to the public – and present it as an active, dependable project – professional behavior is exactly what you implicitly promise and signed up for. If you can’t offer that (at any time, and for any reason), then you should immediately make that clear, front-and-center, to any current and future users.

It isn’t “entitlement” on part of the users – the users are making reasonable expectations based on promises implicitly made by the the project as it is presented.

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> If you offer code to the public – and present it as an active, dependable project – professional behavior is exactly what you implicitly promise and signed up for. If you can’t offer that (at any time, and for any reason), then you should immediately make that clear, front-and-center, to any current and future users.

As far as I can tell, this project was released under the Apache License 2.0.

https://github.com/actix/examples/blob/master/LICENSE

Clause 7 of said license says the following:

"7. Disclaimer of Warranty. Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, Licensor provides the Work (and each Contributor provides its Contributions) on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied, including, without limitation, any warranties or conditions of TITLE, NON-INFRINGEMENT, MERCHANTABILITY, or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. You are solely responsible for determining the appropriateness of using or redistributing the Work and assume any risks associated with Your exercise of permissions under this License."

Other popular free software licenses (namely the GLP) have very similar clauses.

> It isn’t “entitlement” on part of the users – the users are making reasonable expectations based on promises implicitly made by the the project as it is presented.

Expecting labour from someone without paying them is the very definition of entitlement.

> Other popular free software licenses (namely the GLP) have very similar clauses.

What the license says and what image the project presents can be very different. Pointing to the license and reasoning that nobody has legally promised anything contractually is not very useful.

> Expecting labour from someone without paying them is the very definition of entitlement.

That’s a very mercenary view of the world. What about volunteer charity workers? Is it OK for them to just not show up whenever, just because they aren’t paid?

> What about volunteer charity workers? Is it OK for them to just not show up whenever, just because they aren’t paid?

I have some friends whose profession is running charities (i.e. they actually get paid). Volunteers not showing up is exactly what happens, all the time. And my friends expect it, plan for it, because the volunteer is not getting paid to be there. Without that tangible incentive, a volunteer time competes for all the other intangibles competing for time (e.g. "I'm tired", "the kids need something", "friends are going to do something fun at the same time"). They build it into planning: some percent of the people who signed up aren't going to show up...if the weather bad, a bigger percent aren't going to show up. And so on.

They don't get all ranty or judgmental about it, they're just smart enough accept that reality and to plan for that eventuality. Just like anyone using an open source project without paying for it should be.

> What the license says and what image the project presents can be very different. Pointing to the license and reasoning that nobody has legally promised anything contractually is not very useful.

It is quite useful, because the license is the legal document that comes included with the software, and that specifies what things you agree to if you use the software. And it explicitly specifies that you cannot assume any contractual obligations from the "image the project presents", or anything of the sort.

> That’s a very mercenary view of the world. What about volunteer charity workers? Is it OK for them to just not show up whenever, just because they aren’t paid?

I would say that if someone promises to do some charity work and doesn't show up without a good reason is breaking a promise, and is thus being a shitty person. People should keep to their word. Open source authors promised us nothing and owe us nothing. More often than not, we owe them.

> Open source authors promised us nothing and owe us nothing

There is such a thing as an implicit promise. A project which presents itself as active and maintained by a community does implicitly promise a certain level of attention by its maintainers.

> either express or implied

Did you miss this part?

There is such a thing as an implicit promise, but it does not trump an an explicit disclaimer of such attention. Which there is in this case. Once again, thanks for demonstrating the entitled attitude that brought this on.

Would you please edit out personal swipes and/or snark and/or name-calling from your posts to HN? Between this and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22080698, you'd done this more than once in the thread. We're trying for curious conversation here, not flamewar rhetoric.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting, we'd be grateful. I appreciate how much your HN posts have improved, but it's necessary not to break the guidelines.

Lets compare it to an other type of volunteer based work, after school activity for kids. Some of those are going to be free, run by people who volunteer (usually other parents), with disclaimer policy that say that any responsibility is on the parent and no liability may be put on any of the volunteers.

Is there a social contract that put some expectations on the volunteers who are organizing the activity/event, and is that the definition of entitlement?

I would say there is such social contract, and when people expect too much of it there is also entitlement going on. Where the exact line goes is gray zone.

Or to put it another way:

As an open source maintainer, you're perfectly entitled to just walk away. Hit that archive button on github so nothing new can come from the repo, and enjoy your life. Nobody could fault on you that. People would prefer you work out a clean transition to a new maintainer, but you have no obligation to do so.

Deleting the repos is the equivalent of setting the house on fire on the way out (especially when they're under their own org). Unlike in reality, it turns out it's totally permitted, but people will still view it as a dick move.

If you want to rely on some code that it takes even a second of your day to think about your response to author deleting that public code, then you fork it and simply track author's repo.

I don't see why.

Anyone that cared already has their local repository copy.

After all that is what DVCS are all about

Issues and pull requests are often useful documentation (for open source projects, sometimes the only documentation), links to files and lines of code are now broken.

That is what happens when one outsources everything to Github.

This would have happened identically even if the project had its own hosting, so outsourcing hosting to GitHub isn't a factor in this case.

Lkml doesn't seem to have this problem, and they are the original git users.

So all you need to do is get popular and important enough that several unrelated third parties will mirror and host your communications for you.

Or... publish everything as essentially a log in an openly accessible manner (ie. email as a on a list serv with it's web accessible archive), and places like archive.org will happily squirrel it away for you.

I wouldn't happen if instead of git, they used fossil.

It seems like the only "Fossilhub" is this: http://chiselapp.com/

I would guess that it would make it very hard to create a community around the project.

Fossil has everything built in including fully functioning web interface (in contrast to git).

The repo has not been deleted! https://github.com/fafhrd91/actix-web

From the bottom of the postmortem repo:

> At the moment I am planing to make repos private and then delete them (will remove benchmarks as well), unless others suggest better ideas.

so it's not deleted. it's the last call for all the people that wanted to profit from his work to take up the mantle and drive the project

something anyone can do right now, I would add

but people just prefer directing the guy work

> professional behavior is exactly what you implicitly promise and signed up for. If you can’t offer that (at any time, and for any reason), then you should immediately make that clear, front-and-center, to any current and future users.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.

It's in big capital letters there. Explicitly no implied promises.

> It isn’t “entitlement” on part of the users – the users are making reasonable expectations based on promises implicitly made by the the project as it is presented

That is almost literally the definition of entitlement

Yeah, that's really the core of the problem, isn't it. People trying to impose an implicit understanding (which is nothing more that 'this is what I want the world to be like') when there's an explicit statement of 'this is how it actually is'.

The attitude baffles me. So many times I've had someone come in all butthurt and say 'I know it was in the contract, but I didn't think they'd actually enforce it'.

> So many times I've had someone come in all butthurt and say 'I know it was in the contract, but I didn't think they'd actually enforce it'.

or the converse situation "I know I used liberal license but I'm still going to raise hell if people actually do what the license allows"

No, that's not the converse. The license says exactly what it means, which is:

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED,

Period. Calling it a 'liberal license' doesn't mean what you think it means.

To assume certain conditions that are not explicitly laid out without even talking to the person providing you the service is literally entitlement. It seems like you've made assumptions that turned out wrong. I've fallen for it too in the past. Not everyone thinks the same thing so people's assumptions are always different. The key thing is, when your assumptions don't turn out true, to learn from it.

In the case of open source, it's worth asking the maintainer what the terms are if you're unsure. The LICENSE always says that authors and contributors are not liable for any outcome, either as an ALL CAPS paragraph or a clearly defined section.

Everything is provided as-is so you can't expect anything. It's on you to pick up after them if you still need the project.

Exactly. The open source community is far from homogenous, and people who engage in it (maintainers, packagers, <s>leechers</s> users, etc.) tend to have wildly different expectations that vary from person to person. I’m sure RMS, some Contributor Covenant wielder and I won’t ever agree on a set of assumptions.

Moreover, companies present themselves as “active, dependable project”s then go belly up all the time. Not sure why hobby projects should be held to a higher standard.

No you don’t. You aren’t alone in assuming that, but it’s an entirely unreasonable expectation. And as evidenced by this exact thread, people like you cause good developers to stop maintaining their projects. Your attitude harms our community.

Practically speaking, if I give you some work I did for free yesterday, and give you some work I do for free today, that does not entitle you to free work from me tomorrow. It does not entitle you to free support on the code I’ve published already. I owe you my time when you’re paying for it. Until then, if I have made something you found valuable you are in my debt for its use. Not the other way around.

As a user of my software I generally give you two rights - you have the right to use the code in your project, and the right to fork the project. And as the maintainer, I have the right to spend my time however I want for the rest of my short life on earth. If the beach looks like more fun than putting up with entitled complaints on github and HN, that is my right.

Cool, you don’t have to work in the project if you don’t want to. But going and nuking it off the face of the earth so nobody can have it is still impolite.

It's good that git clones are all complete, full copies, including history.

And for that I am quite thankful that it is so widely used.

But they don't have the issues nor pull requests that were open when the repo disappeared.

Should have used fossil :)

Strongly disagree. For me, what's implicit is that any software, commercial or F/OSS, can be abandoned at any time - because that's just the way it is. A remedy would be to use software coded to a specification with mulitple implementations such that in case a project folds, you might be able to switch over to a different implementation. The Java EE ecosystem used to be like that until around 2012 or so.

Abandon is different from deleting everything.

Ofc, git is distributed, so someone should have a copy of the repo, even if it's not updated.

Edit: disregard post, apparently it's just moved to the personal account.

Not deleted.

> I moved actix-net and actix-web project to my personal github account. I will make decision during next couple days what to do. I don’t want to see the project becomes ghost of what it was. Maintainers must understand how everything work, but don’t anyone who does and those who could are busy with other projects. At the moment I am planing to make repos private and then delete them (will remove benchmarks as well), unless others suggest better ideas.

I see thanks

That's very much a "Not deleted _yet_"

With distributed version control, is anything ever really deleted? How does he have the power to delete everyone else's local copy of the project and prevent them all from forking and maintaining it?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22074620

> what's implicit is that any software, commercial or F/OSS, can be abandoned at any time

This is particularly true when you look at what licenses say:

... THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.

... THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE PROGRAM IS WITH YOU.

... IN NO EVENT SHALL <COPYRIGHT HOLDER> BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

The onus is always on yourself to insure against everything.

Good examples

I've never heard of "implicit promises". For me a promise is by definition explicit. Anything else are assumptions, in this case false assumptions.

In many contexts, there’s often an implicit promise to be courteous to others, even if it’s not defined explicitly.

From my skim of the maintainer's comment, this happened because people didn't keep their end of the promise.

I, and most people reading this, likely never interacted with this person. From where I sit, this is what's colloquially referred to as a "dick move".

“Implicit promises” is going into my Orwellian dictionary. What a farce, do people really believe such a thing?

It’s strange that you’re unfamiliar with the term. It’s an important concept in legal contexts, and the same general concept applies in all sorts of situations where people make reasonable inferences about other people’s behavior. It’s even called out as a real thing that is then explicitly denied in many OSS licenses, because otherwise such implicit promises might have legal implications.

Yeah, no.

If you put your code out there open, it's still your code. If people start to rely on it, they need to be ready to maintain their branch.

I do not think these expectations are reasonable. This line of thinking is definitely the core issue of the problem.

>If you offer code to the public – and present it as an active, dependable project

Not familiar with the project or Rust Ecosystem. Anyone else can comment whether it was presented / marketed / sold as an "active, dependable project" ?

As someone more used to the Ruby Rails ecosystem, I think the communities as a whole generally accept the convention that all open sources, whether they are backed by a single person or cooperate account, are given out as it is ( MIT ) and their maintainer or author will do the support or development as they could when they are FREE. And it is perfectly acceptable of forking it to make your own variation or improvement.

> you implicitly promise and signed up for

Think about this. Do you really think it makes any sense to try to hold people to promises inferred by alternate parties that aren’t even providing any consideration in return?

Just think about that.

A large amount of human interactions work this way. It's fuzzy and messy, with many shades of gray, but the world is filled with implicit promises with varying degrees of commitment and severity.

Well sure.

That's exactly why I encourage people to think about it.

It's a delusion to believe random strangers owe you anything (beyond basic compassion and curtesy) and you'll continue to be unhappy until you let go of that delusion.

Apparently a number people believed this developer worked long hours on this project (for free) because they were obligated to do so. Not only was that incorrect, it seems to have contributed to the dev leaving the project since some people felt justified in making rude (and sometimes angry) demands.

Thinking about it is important because when you do, you can see there's no reason at all to believe that the dev would put in a lot of work for free to maintain a project while continuously receiving abuse from a reddit mob while doing so.

> professional behavior is exactly what you implicitly promise and signed up for.

Wise up. Professionals get paid, if you aren't paying some one they are not a professional. This is the reason why opensource projects provide professional support for pay, for professionals who need professional support.

I think that's made pretty clear in pretty much every open source license: "Licensor provides the Work (and each Contributor provides its Contributions) on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND".

That’s a legal, not a social statement. Following the letter of the document that governs your work doesn’t mean you still can’t do something that would be inconsiderate.

I am honestly confused by this line of thinking. what should projects do in your opinion? should there be a LEGAL-LICENSE and SOCIAL-LICENSE?

I believe that the legal is the "top-level" statement that sets expectations all the way down.

Legal documents don’t really make an affordance for what would be impolite versus what would be against the license. Usually I think the unwritten expectations work out ok (for example, in a project I help maintain I recently wrote out an apology for stepping away from development and ignoring contributions to fulfill these obligations) but perhaps writing it down in some sort of Code of Conduct style document might be beneficial.

I think that people have pretty much put their "core values" into their licenses these days. People who don't want Amazon to run their software as a service use the AGPL. People that don't really want an open source project but want to put "open source!!!11!" on the box add caveats like "you can't run this code on a device you didn't buy from us" (very common in the keyboard firmware market).

If people aren't choosing a license compatible with their values, then that's on them. The era of Github only giving you free hosting if you pick a DFSG-compatible license are long over; you could put the Windows source code on Github and they would be happy to use a heart emoji to describe how they feel about it.

> you should immediately make that clear, front-and-center, to any current and future users.

like, for example, in a license file?

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