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> It is entirely the maintainer's responsibility to establish the type of open source project it is.

On what basis does a developer assume this responsibility? You are saying that by uploading a library that works well, and whose presentation (docs, etc) are high quality ("professional") that the owner now has the responsibility to publicly state whether this is a personal project or not, and they must state their SLA and process with respect to accepting patches? No such thing.

> That's entirely the fault of the maintainer. They set all that up. They established the expectations of the project.

If the maintainer says "I shall provide X amount of service" but then does not, that's on the maintainer.

But if a user likes a library and starts depending on it without checking if the library is "properly maintained", that's on the user. How can it be otherwise?

> You are saying that by uploading a library that works well, and whose presentation (docs, etc) are high quality ("professional") that the owner now has the responsibility to publicly state whether this is a personal project or not, and they must state their SLA and process with respect to accepting patches?

No, I'm not. I'm saying if you setup an open source project framed as a project that is production ready & open to patches with a guise of being run by an organization and intentions of having a community, then it is reasonable to expect that you actually do that. You don't accidentally make a github organization, after all. There are community norms around what you can expect when working with such projects. Particularly when then both the github page and the webpage speak of being welcome to contributions ( https://github.com/actix/examples#contribute ) and building a community.

This was not just a high-quality library tossed out into the wild that got adoption. This is a library complete with these pages https://actix.rs/community/ & https://actix.rs/code/

The author did a hell of a lot more than just "uploading a library" here. As such, the developer assumes these responsibilities because it's what they said.

You are always responsible for what you broadcast.

Read the license, it frames the project exactly.

The license only frames the projects legal responsibilities. It is entirely unrelated in every way to how the project is run on a day to day basis.

Alternatively if we're going to just go strictly by the license then the maintainer deserved all the flames & flak he got. After all, it wasn't against the license, therefore he cannot complain about it. Just like that idea is unreasonable, so too is trying to hide behind the license in this case.

> The license only frames the projects legal responsibilities. It is entirely unrelated in every way to how the project is run on a day to day basis.

You completely missed the point. At the end of the day, the legal obligations are the only ones, and both the Apache and MIT licenses very clearly state that the creator of the software has no obligations to any user.

Therefore, any other supposed obligations only exist in the mind of the person who has created them, and do not exist in reality.

> Alternatively if we're going to just go strictly by the license then the maintainer deserved all the flames & flak he got. After all, it wasn't against the license, therefore he cannot complain about it. Just like that idea is unreasonable, so too is trying to hide behind the license in this case.

Sorry, this doesn't make sense, because you're comparing an explicit statement of liability in the license to the social norm of not being a massive jerk.

> Sorry, this doesn't make sense, because you're comparing an explicit statement of liability in the license to the social norm of not being a massive jerk.

Of course it doesn't make sense, that was my point! In the same way it doesn't make any sense to do what you're doing, which is comparing the explicit statement of liability in the license to the social norm of how open source projects are framed & run.

You missed the point that everything we're talking about is just social norms. The license is irrelevant here, for all sides. There is no legal issue being disputed.

No, everything is not just social norms, because there is no agreed upon norm or standard "framing" for open source projects (as indicated by all the disagreements here and elsewhere on this topic), leaving the actual license as the only concrete, agreed upon description of obligations and expectations between the creator/maintainer and users.

> You completely missed the point. At the end of the day, the legal obligations are the only ones, and both the Apache and MIT licenses very clearly state that the creator of the software has no obligations to any user.

There's a word for people who only fulfill their legal obligations: Assholes.

> There's a word for people who only fulfill their legal obligations: Assholes.

There's also a word for people who expect others to meet their expectations without contributing anything on their end: Assholes.

If you explicitly state up front what you're willing to do to support a project, and I come along demand you go above and beyond your stated limitations, who is being unreasonable here?

Oh yes, the assholes in this particular situation are without a doubt the people attacking Nikolay over this.

However, I read your earlier comment as meaning roughly "anyone who releases any software under an MIT/X11 license has zero obligations to anything regarding that software period" which is something I do disagree with.

My point is that consumers of software released under licenses which don't obligate the creator to do anything shouldn't expect more from the creator than that.

If the creator does act as a "good steward", that's great, but you shouldn't plan on that being the case or be surprised when it isn't.

I think we are in agreement, though I wouldn't use the word "expect" in that way.

How would you use it in this context?

> There's a word for people who only fulfill their legal obligations: Assholes.

There's also a word for people who stake their professional reputation on the work of random assholes on the internet.

The license is to a project's readme what patent claims are to the rest of the patent document: when there is a conflict, it's the one thing both sides can agree on.

However professional and well-presentend the project is, at the end of the day maintainers are doing this primarily because they like it. If they don't like doing something related to the project then no one can blame them for that.

Every open source project has a warranty disclaimer. It really doesn't tell you anything about how serious the project is.

Open-source means freedom to fork, nothing more. But that's ancillary to the rest of your comment.

Your statement is false. They called for contributors many times, last time in August https://github.com/fafhrd91/actix-web/issues/1019 .. This was public and open message and is not the first time.

Though while people are ready to open issues and complain, sometimes even supply patches and make big noise if they do not pass code review, there were nobody who could join to share responsibility in making decisions about the project.

> Your statement is false. They called for contributors many times, last time in August https://github.com/fafhrd91/actix-web/issues/1019 .. This was public and open message and is not the first time.

That thread is full of people trying to sign up and help. Either they all lied or nobody was accepted.