Open Source Is Not About You (2018)

Since the comments on the Gist are almost exclusively in agreement, here is a rare one that adds a sobering touch:

https://gist.github.com/richhickey/1563cddea1002958f96e7ba95...

"As a user of something open source you are not thereby entitled to anything at all. You are not entitled to contribute. You are not entitled to features. You are not entitled to the attention of others. You are not entitled to having value attached to your complaints. You are not entitled to this explanation."

The innocence! In 2021 many "open" source projects are controlled by representatives of FAANG, who do very little but want to establish themselves as whip crackers.

So they play the game that corporations love: "Grow" the team at any cost.

In 2021 you are absolutely entitled to "contribute", be pushy and scold long term maintainers, as long as you pander to the corporate cabal.

Reading this gist makes me sad. It is a relic of a better world that has been corrupted by money and mediocrity.

I feel Big Tech has warped the definition of open source by buying into it as a consumption model, not a participation model. After all, as a developer I don’t really care about contributing code, I just want free stuff. Google, Mongo, AWS , and others are more than happy to fulfill that need (each for their own selfish reasons).

For this reason, when we encounter “true” open source, we are perplexed why someone won’t help us for free. Sadly this just reinforces a kind of learned helplessness where we fed we can’t do anything without the open source project solving our problem...

Here's a blog post [1] by a Python core developer, which is in a similar vein.

[1] https://snarky.ca/setting-expectations-for-open-source-parti...