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Comment by growse | Hacker News Reader

It's a social contract, which for many people is a moral contract.

Where is this mythical social contract found? I stand by my point: it's a software license, not a marriage.

Free users certainly would like it to be a social contract like I would like to be gifted a million dollars. Sadly, I still have to work and can't infinitely rely on the generosity of others.

Where is the contract to return the shopping cart to the corral?

Your analogy doesn't make sense. You are getting benefits from using the shopping cart and you bring back as it's expected as part of the exchange. You bring the cart back to where you took which is a low effort commitment entirely proportional to what you got from it.

Free software developers are gifting you something. Expecting indefinite free work is not mutual respect. That's entitlement.

The common is still there. You have the code. Open source is not a perpetual service agreement. It is not indentured servitude to the community.

Stop trying to guilt trip people into giving you free work.

MinIO accepted contributions from people outside the company who did work on it for free, usually because they expected that minio would keep the software open source.

The last open source version of MinIO didn't disappear when they stopped maintaining it.

In this context the social contract would be an expectation that specifically software developers must return the shopping cart for you, but you would never expect the same from cashiers, construction workers, etc.

If the software developer doesn't return your cart, he betrayed the social contract.

This sounds very manipulative and narcissistic.

I always preferred people who didn’t, when I worked in retail. It generates a nice chill task (wander around the parking lot looking for carts). But if you want to do a favor for the faceless retailer, go for it. Mostly I chuck my cart in the corral to get it out of my way, but this sees more like a morally-neutral action to me.

The social contract is found (and implicitly negotiated) in the interactions between humans, ie: society.

Sounds like you've misunderstood this particular social contract. Luckily several people in this thread have corrected you.

Seems like the interaction that happened here was that they stopped supporting it

Show me a FOSS license where a commitment to indefinite maintenance is promised.

Social contracts are typically unwritten so the license would be the wrong place to look for it.

If it's neither written nor explicitly spoken, then it's not a contract of any kind. It's just an - usually naive - expectation.

A social contract isn't a legal contract to begin with, but even for those "written or explicitly spoken" is not a hard requirement.

A social contract still has to be explicit in some way to be considered such. Otherwise it's just an accepted convention.

That's not what a social contract is you are thinking of a legal contract, something very different. A social contract is by definition, implicit rather than explicit.

It was not expectation when they started, did a lot to lure many into the ecosystem. When you release it free, wait for the momentum to build, then you cut off, it is something else. And the worse is they did it in a very short time. Check out elasticsearch, the same route but did not abandon the 7 release like this.

I know all about ElasticSearch, MongoDB, Redis, etc. Yes, what they did sucks. No, it doesn't make the maintainers bad or anything. It's still on the user to know that anything can happen to that spiffy project they've been using for a while, and so be prepared to migrate at any time.

> Social contracts are typically unwritten

Maybe this is the case, but why is your presumption of entitlement to free labor of others the assumed social contract, the assumed "moral" position, rather than the immoral one?

Why is the assumed social contract that is unwritten not that you can have the free labor we've released to you so far, but we owe you nothing in the future?

There's too much assumption of the premise that "moral" and "social contract" are terms that make the entitled demands of free-loaders the good guys in this debate. Maybe the better "morality" is the selfless workers giving away the product of their labor for free are the actual good guys.

Expectations are maybe fine maybe not, but it's funny that people can slap the word moral onto their expectation of others being obligated to do free work for them, and it's supposed to make them be the good guys here.

Why do you presume to think your definition of morals is shared by everyone? Why is entitlement to others labor the moral position, instead of the immoral position?

> Why is entitlement to others labor the moral position, instead of the immoral position?

You seem to be mistaking me for someone arguing that anyone is entitled to others' labour?

No, social contracts require some sort of mutual benefit.

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