Hacker News Reader

Comment by TedDoesntTalk | Hacker News Reader

This is precisely why I have a private git repo.

It would be sad if people could only chose between "Public and I commit to maintain this for all of you" and "Private and it's just for me". What's wrong with "This is public but it's still for me, you're welcome to use it if you want to but don't expect anything from me".

This is what open source is really about for me.

I agree with this so much that I strongly feel that it should actually be an repos option as it clearly lays out the responsibilities of all parties should they choose to use the code.

It's almost like we should have some sort of text we can all copy paste in our repositories to indicate this sort of thing.

Mine will always contain: THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO ...

And then maybe we should add something about that people can actually use it if they want to: Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files ...

Should try to start this is an effort for real!

I usually just put some text to the extent of "this code was written by myself for myself and I'm really not looking for pull requests" in the README.

If you get tired of repeating yourself, do what I wrote about in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28663996 and just use the MIT license. It has all of this outlined explicitly already.

I see what you mean, but in my experience most people will at least skim the README while they ignore the license entirely. So, by putting it in a clearly visible position in the README (say just below the repo title) I catch a few extra people and prevent them from sending in issues/PRs in the first place.

It's also not like it's a lot of work, a 30 seconds one-time investment in my time is less time than I spend on most HN comments.

Totally agree, open source is about sharing code, designs, solutions to problems, etc. not running, maintaining, and and promoting a project.

Some open source efforts are geared towards running, maintaining, and promoting a project.

Adoptopenjdk comes to mind. https://adoptopenjdk.net/

This seems like a volunteer project _around_ open source rather than open source. It may seem pedantic but it feels useful (to me at least) to separate the act of sharing and collaboratively improving code from the projects and politics that often get built around that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com