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Comment by foldr | Hacker News Reader

>People in charge of large FOSS projects like Gnome should not pretend it's just some hobby project they can do whatever they want with. Those projects are essentially public infrastructure and should be treated as such. It's not their personal plaything.

They're not pretending. I'm afraid you're laboring under a misconception. Nothing obliges the GNOME team to accede to the wishes of people who contribute nothing to the project.

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"Nothing obliges the GNOME team to accede to the wishes of people who contribute nothing to the project"

Nothing, until users flee and they stop receiving bug reports, patches, donations, and so forth. Moreover, because of what Gnome is, if they drive users away it will also negatively impact other projects, because for a lot of those users leaving Gnome means ditching open source software entirely and switching to e.g. OS X.

If the users aren't willing to fork, then having them run away to osx (where, by the way, everything is also imposed on you) doesn't seem that great of a loss.

Part of the joy of open source are the freedoms it gives you, including the freedom to fork a project that doesn't meet your needs and make it so that it does. This works as it should pretty often - look at the gnome2 forks, the systemd-less distros etc. There's plenty of choice out there, and plenty of opportunity to get involved.

If you're unwilling to exercise those freedoms, then you're just whining about the stuff you're getting for free.

You are right that with OS X you have no particular say over the features. On the other hand, you do not have to deal with poorly supported hardware, and if something goes wrong there are people whose job is to help you. Most users find those things to be advantages, but many will choose open source software because of the various other freedoms they can get. There are also people who choose open source software because they have unusual requirements that proprietary systems either cannot meet or are too difficult/expensive/onerous to deal with.

Losing users is always a bad thing for the open source ecosystem. Lost users means fewer bug reports, fewer patches, fewer donations, and less support from paid developers working for various corporations (easy to forget but there are people whose job is to maintain open source projects like the Linux kernel). Fewer users means less incentive for hardware companies to provide any support, even just minimal technical documentation, needed for open source developers to write drivers (let alone contribute to that).

Forks require a significant commitment of time and effort, and really should be considered a last resort. The time commitment is much greater for prominent projects that receive a lot of activity like Gnome or Linux. Most users, even those with the necessary technical skills, do not have enough spare time to maintain a fork when things break.

Your dismissive attitude is fine for a obscure hobbyist project with a dozen users. It makes no sense for desktop Linux distros that now have many millions of users.

I understand where this thinking comes from but I still think it's kind of a simplistic attitude. People depend on the technology they use. When you convince someone to rely on something you've produced (and, crucially, continue working on), I think you do actually create a duty to be responsive to them. They depend on your work. Are we really so limited in our ethical thinking that we require an exchange of money to create obligation?

I understand that people can be aggressive, rude, and downright hostile. I'm not suggesting that such behavior be rewarded. Nor am I suggesting that every open source project has to do everything any user says. I do, however, object to the notion that there is no obligation whatsoever between the producer of a technology and the users of that technology, regardless of whether money has changed hands.

If you read the fine print there is, quite literally, no obligation at all. From the MIT license:

    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.

You will find that most other FOSS licenses contain a similar clause.

That's a legal disclaimer designed to head off a specific commercial legal liability. If you go looking to use law as a foundation for right and wrong, you're going to be sorely disappointed.

What I quoted isn't a law, this is something that authors have to deliberately put in their licenses/contracts for the specific work in question. If you wish to have other obligations with your open source software that you believe are less wrong, it would be wise to get those in writing.

> it would be wise to get those in writing.

I agree with that, projects should clearly state their goals and priorities upfront. But relying on legalese from MIT license is not the solution.

It's not clear what else it is that you'd want. The MIT license seems to get used because it's short and to the point in stating priorities: Here's the software, do what you want with it, but don't take credit and don't come after us if it doesn't work for your use case or if it causes your CPU to explode. If your issue is with the "legalese," it wouldn't be any less meaningful if you stated it differently.

You somehow think that someone who’s done you a favor (by providing you with useful software for free) owes you more than someone who’s done nothing for you at all. That’s exactly backwards. You are obliged to them!

I struggle to express how strongly disagree. This is like saying that someone who gives away a 3D printer on freecycle is then obliged to help you fix any problems with it.

>> Nothing obliges the GNOME team to accede to the wishes of people who contribute nothing to the project.

I said nothing of the sort. They have an obligation to the project and its value as a piece of infrastructure used by many (including noncontributors).

But by saying that they have an obligation to noncontributors you do seem to be saying something at least in the neighborhood of what I suggested. I can’t understand where you think this obligation comes from. I used GNOME for a while. I never once imagined that the people who worked on it owed me a damn thing.

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