Comment by nathell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nathell | Hacker News Reader

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It makes Rich Hickey’s „Open Source Is Not About You” [0] particularly poignant.

As a hobbyist developer/maintainer of open source projects, I strive to remember that this is my gift to the world, and it comes with no strings attached. If people have any expectations about the software, it’s for them to manage; if they depend on it somehow, it’s their responsibility to ensure timely resolution of issues. None of this translates to obligations on my part, unless I explicitly make promises.

I empathize with Lasse having been slowed down by mental issues. I have, too. And we need to take good care of ourselves, and proactively prevent the burden of maintainership from exacerbating those issues.

[0]: https://gist.github.com/g1eny0ung/9e7d4d0f72547a8d156452e76f...

>having been slowed down by mental issues

Anyone and everyone in the OSS world should be concerned about this too. You have nation state level actors out there with massive amounts of information on you. How much information have you leaked to data brokers? These groups will know how much debt you're in. The status of your relationships. Your health conditions and medications? It would not take much on their part to make your life worse and increase your stress levels. Just imagine things like fake calls from your bank saying that debt of yours has been put in collections.

Not just nation state actors. All that data is available to anyone with a credit card from legit data dealers.

This is why I find some disclaimers in some open source projects quite superfiscial, that the software is provided as is without any warranty. Of course it is, this should be the obvious default.

If there is a law that would entitle a user to more, it is a bug in legislation that needs urgent fixing.

I see this as sort of the pivot on how people choose an open source license. When you feel like you are building the thing for others use a gplish license, it has all sorts of clauses around getting everyone to play nice. Building the thing for yourself however, I think the bsd style license makes more sense. you don't really care what anyone else is doing with it, you don't want to form a community. however, because it is trivial to share source code, you do so.

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