Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry but there's a social contract. It's implicit, the moment you participate in a society the expectations from you and obligations towards you begin.

Even if someone asks you the directions to the gas station, you are expected not to deceive them and give them the best instructions to you your ability and they are expected to show some appreciation for helping out the society. You will face backslash if you don't help a fellow human or deceive them despite the fact that you are not receiving direct payment for your act.

Imagine you put a sign that says "The mall is in this way" and the sign is not entirely correct. It was a free sign, no one contracted you to put that sign but if it happens that your sign wastes someones time you will receive negative feedback and probably requests to correct your sign.

View on HN

There is an assumption not to be an asshole. But that's where it ends. If an endless stream if cars likes your directions, they can't expect you to keep standing where you are, giving each of them directions.

In the same way, if someone posts some code you can file a bug or give a patch, but that doesn't entitle you to anything from the original author. Maybe you helped him making the code better and you're scratching each other's back. Maybe the author is just extra nice to you. But just because you've received a gift, you're not entitled to more gifts.

> There is an assumption not to be an asshole.

I think some of the disagreement in this thread is just over whether someone is being an asshole if they leave buggy code lying around with no warnings attached, and rejecting /ignoring requests to remedy the situation.

In my opinion, there is no expectation for someone to accept your requests or PRs. It's definitely not the norm, but I reserve the right to not do anything that I don't want to do. You don't know someone's life situation or current goals; that library or tool may work fine in their use case or they don't have the time/desire to implement a fix or review a PR.

That's why forking exists.

That's the risk of pulling in external libraries from random developers. Unless you're willing to put money where your mouth is, then all you reasonably can do is politely request a fix or for them to merge your PR.

You sure are reaching really far to claim that someone giving you something for free owes you even more.

Maybe I am misreading them but I don't quite think that's what they're saying so much as "you can't market your free product to other people as something they can and should be using, and then turn around and tell them to fuck off when they come back with complaints that it doesn't live up to those claims".

A lot of open source projects seem to do this. If you make it clear your project is just something you found useful and others might too, then I don't think anyone really has a complaint about that.

I'm not talking about society in general. I'm talking about random F/OSS projects on github. There is zero expectation when looking at someone's project from afar.

> There is zero expectation when looking at someone's project from afar.

Let's say I release some code that is isn't fit for purpose. For example, it corrupts user data 5% of the time.

The code has a README that doesn't mention the issue, and I close all issues that refer to the problem. I also reject any PRs that try to fix it, and so on. I don't, however, disable issues or say the code is unmaintained, so there is a steady stream of people whose data gets corrupted when they download and use my code.

Since you don't seem to like the term "social contract", would you at least admit that I am violating a few norms and acting like an asshole?

You are free to fork it, fix the corruption issue and uphold the social contract of your fork.

> You are free to fork it, fix the corruption issue and uphold the social contract of your fork.

The freedom to fork (for any reason) is orthogonal to the question of whether the maintainer is being an asshole or not.

Of course, people are also free to be assholes (for any reason). But it shouldn't be controversial to say "don't be an asshole".

A social contract takes place when everyone contributes. If one does the work and others do the demands... it's not a "collaboration", which is a pre-requisite for a social contract.

You could argue there is a social contract between the repo maintainer and various submitters. Not so much between the repo owner and users/consumers.

No there isn't. The software is provided as is, without warranty, express or implied. This is critical to understand.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com