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Comment by arp242 | Hacker News Reader

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I don't find it unreasonable at all, the author is under no obligation to communicate in any particular way.

If a stranger drives through my neighborhood and asks "when are you going to plant begonias? I drive through here all the time but I want to see begonias", a fine response is "if you want to pay for some begonias, I'll plant them!"

You don't have a "begonias, open for everyone to view" sign though. The comparison makes no sense.

Fair enough, a better comparison might be that my "begonias for everyone to view" yard has a stranger say "when are you going to get bigger begonias?"

The response is then the same.

You have "begonias for everyone to view" and purchased a bigger begonia (visible to everyone but not yet planted), and a stranger asks "when are you going to plant the big begonia?".

Doesn't sound strange or entitled to me.

Totally, it's not strange or entitled to ask. But it's also not strange or entitled to reply with "when I get around to it, unless you want to come help!"

Right, instead mitmproxy comes with this sign:

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. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

So not only is there not "begonias, open for everyone to view" sign in this case but there is a big sign saying "NO BEGONIAS GUARANTEED. IF YOU DON'T LIKE THE PLANTS WE CURRENTLY HAVE, THAT'S NOT OUR PROBLEM."

The maintainer could theoretically have responded a bit more gently, but if I got that response to a query on a GitHub PR, I would have thought "oops, touched a nerve" and apologized for coming off as pushy.

Maintainers are humans, and they're humans who deal with an insane amount of entitlement from unreasonable people. Their "I'm being exploited" nerves are a little oversensitive from repeated exposure, and that's understandable and forgivable.

Besides, the fact that the IBM employee followed up the way they did shows that Maximilian's "I'm being exploited" reaction was dead on—the person he was dealing with was not being reasonable. They responded to a very slight escalation in tone by throwing around dangerous words like "extortion". Would you have done that?

Obviously "apologized for coming off as pushy" would have been better, yes, but it's not just the maintainers who are human: turns out IBM engineers are also human. It's a simple question that can have a simple answer; there's no reason to not give it, really.

You don’t give planned release dates to customers as a rule of thumb for the simple reason that somebody will take it as a promise and complain when you miss the date for some reason. It’s a lesson you learn quickly.

This goes double for Open Source projects. And the person asking is a leecher like here, I definitely wouldn’t commit to date either.

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