Open Source Maintainers Owe You Nothing (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Open Source Maintainers Owe You Nothing (2018)

mikemcquaid.com

34 pointsalexellisuk10 comments

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Discussed at the time:

Open Source Maintainers Owe You Nothing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16631476 - March 2018 (26 comments)

Curious to see almost no maintainers, and very little empathy in the 2018 comments.

Hopefully that'll change in this posting.

Aggressive titles like that tend to provoke people into responding in kind, so in that way it's a co-creation.

I think it'd be useful for projects to have a maintainer status report that they update periodically. Something to let people know what kind of interests & commitments the maintainers/authors have for the project. I think we could do better, but for example, a scale of decreasing interest might look like: ACTIVE/MAINTAINED/PERIODIC/INFREQUENT/UNINTERESTED/ABANDONED.

Trying to assess motivations I think is core. There's a never ending series of articles on _why, but "What we can learn from _why the long lost open source developer"[1], which drills fairly well into their mis-aligned interests versus the highly industrialized environment about them, showing very different core motivations. Being able to express that personality, of why people are here, what it is they're shooting for, I think is missing context in open source.

A more down to earth & near-at-hand example of developer interest might be Tom MacWright, who put projects up for adoption[2] (2016), and started a repo naming their projects that are up for adoption. This is one of the core examples I think of, when it comes to developers trying to express their relationship to their works: these could still be good & useful, but I don't want to take care of them myself.

[1] https://github.com/readme/featured/why-the-lucky-stiff https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28882819 (3 comments)

[2] https://macwright.com/2016/01/30/adopt.html https://github.com/tmcw-up-for-adoption

Can't press this enough being someone who expected clear customer service than from OSS maintainers than understand it is a community effort. I was 13 then, but still was a pretty wrong thing to expect.

I would argue that you shouldn't even need the license to state open source software to come with no commitments. There was no contract and no money changed hands, so I believe the uniform commercial code doesn't apply.

That is not true. As long as the software is not licensed, we do not have a legal right to use the code as it is an intellectual property of someone else. Using such code opens up the ability for the owner to sue us if he is in the right place with the right preparation.

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that it wasn't licensed at all. I was arguing from the point of view of the author, not the user. Because there is no contract nor consideration/payment, the author is (or ought to be, morally) by default under no obligations nor liabilities.

Of course

To be a devil's advocate here, because I am in a similar position. I am myself stuck with an (admittedly non-open-source) project that nevertheless has a set of daily users. A true tar baby.

And I foisted that on the world, so I shouldn't duck the responsibility for maintenance thereof, unless it really exceeds my capabilities.

That does not mean that I owe everyone everything, but I sort-of owe the general user public some kind of support, or I feel so myself.

There is a line in the Little Prince, where the fox says "You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed." It resonates with me deeply.

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