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Comment by Eufrat | Hacker News Reader

I just cannot understand this logic, can you explain why there is no responsibility whatsoever on the part of a maintainer towards the users?

Selling a toaster has an implicit warranty of merchantability. Society expects that if you sell me something, it should have certain promises. Yes, there’s no monetary exchange here, the work is given gratis, but there’s still a relationship and an interaction here and I think it is clear some people, like myself, believe that there are implied expectations. Just because it is “free” doesn’t mean it allows one to have a seemingly psychopathic attitude on the matter. It doesn’t absolve people of societal obligations.

I read that article by Mike McQuaid and I don’t get the impression that, “Yes, project maintainers should be allowed to run projects as they see fit and they put up with a lot of drive-by insults and hostile users. You don’t understand how hard all of this is and I’m doing it for free.” I get, “I hate my users and you should be grateful that I give you anything.”

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If I hated my users I wouldn’t work on Homebrew for 17 years. I do hate a small subset of hostile users.

The selling metaphor doesn’t work. Homebrew is not sold and its license, effectively a EULA, discloses all warranties because it is not sold and we are not paid a wage to build it.

I have also built a bunch of proprietary software for money where my obligations are different. I also enjoy that and my responsibilities differ there.

Users should be grateful that they are given anything. We do not get anything from their use. For the vast majority, it is a one way relationship (contributors excluded of course).

If they don’t like the choices made by me or the project: they can fork it. They won’t, though, because the closest friend of entitlement is laziness. They can use Nix or MacPorts instead which may be a better fit for them and, if they are not contributing, does not disadvantage Homebrew.

Thanks for chiming in. I appreciate that this is the position of you and a large chunk of folks, but I don’t think I’m ever going to fully understand it.

If you don’t mind me probing a little further, what is the motivation to work on it?

> they can fork it

I get that, but I also think it is too pat a narrative at the same time. I think the success of the project is both a testament to the effort that you and the Homebrew team have put into it. It is also an example of just how much effort any project really takes; this stuff doesn’t set itself up nor do all the patching required to make sure things behave as well as they do.

> If you don’t mind me probing a little further, what is the motivation to work on it?

Not the person you're replying to, but I do it because it's fun. Programming is a passion of mine, and has been a part of my life since my dad gave me a book on BASIC when I was 8 years old. I love solving problems with code. Giving it away as open source is, in a way, philanthropy to me, with the hope that at least some of the things I create are useful to others. There's also a bit of a "political" aspect to it, in that I think it is bad for society for all useful programs to be locked up in proprietary software, making everyone dependent on profit-seeking corporations (whose interests and incentives are often hostile to their users) to provide the software they need to use in their daily lives. My work is a small contribution to combat that.

That joy I feel hits a wall when I run into an entitled, lazy user who thinks that I owe them something more than what I've already given. If most users were like that, I just wouldn't do it. Or at most I'd do it, releasing under a pseudonym, and have no public issue tracker, pull request mechanism, or public contact information. That would make the project worse, not better, of course, but the most important thing to me is my mental health and my happiness. If that's selfish, so be it.

> > they can fork it

> I get that, but I also think it is too pat a narrative at the same time.

I'm not sure what you expect someone to do with that statement. So what if it's "too pat"? That's the reality of the situation. It's the maintainer's way or the highway. If you don't like it, then open source has a truly wonderful escape hatch that proprietary software doesn't: you can fork and go your own way with it.

Many open source communities have problems, certainly, but I think many of the better ones are the some of the closest things we have to true meritocracies. If you do the work, and the work is good and valued, you get a say. If you don't, you don't. And yes, I would say "providing good, helpful, actionable feedback" can be part of "doing the work", so people who don't write code can have a say, depending on how well they are able to provide value to the process. But people who just want to take: no, they don't get a say, and that's exactly how it should -- and must -- be.

kelnos beat me to it but: because working on it is fun. I don't think most people in our industry will understand decade+ open source maintainers of large projects and that's fine. I don't understand how designers can do what they do either. I would say that those of us who stick around and don't burn out quickly tend to share my ideas of "owe nothing" and "have fun" much more than "I must make sure I am always responsible and responsive to my users desires" who tend to seem permanently stressed before burning out.

I use my words carefully: I don't "owe" my users anything but that doesn't mean I don't "give" them anything. It's charity as opposed to taxes; I do so freely and on my own terms rather than obligation.

On forking: yes, it's a lot of work and forking would also be a lot of work. That's exactly the point. Lots of people over the years could have forked Homebrew but no meaningful forks have taken off because those who are most dissatisfied with our decisions are least willing to do the work to solve these problems.

Hope that clarifies. Thanks for the polite discussion :)

> Selling a toaster has an implicit warranty of merchantability. Society expects that if you sell me something, it should have certain promises. Yes, there’s no monetary exchange here, the work is given gratis, but there’s still a relationship and an interaction here and I think it is clear some people, like myself, believe that there are implied expectations.

No there isn't.

Pay money and there's a contract.

Anything else is in your head.

If you induce someone to expend resources you can have liability even if those resources are not a payment to you. You can’t license your way out liability if you advertised, formally or informally, certain features and functionality that cause people to act on that advertisement. It’s called reliance interest. It’s an actual legal principle with case law supporting it.

Can you cite the case law about an open source project having a reliance interest?

full-disclosure: i skimmed the wiki on reliance damages, and concluded you're wrong. it goes something like this: reliance damages require you produce a contract, or some other evidence, that demonstrates you were promised some thing you did not receive, or some outcome you didn't experience. essentially, your claim is: a README file has more standing, in a court of law, than the LICENSE file sitting next to it at the root. cute, but preposterous.

anyway, to the gist of this reply: you disagree with the license conditions. an important, but rather obvious, observation to be had is that, the rights the LICENSE offers, are contingent on your acceptance of the LICENSE conditions. one cannot be had without the other.

the LICENSE is real, it's a contract, and is in effect the moment you obtain a copy.

> You can’t [un-]license your way out [of the] liability if you [copied], formally or informally, [wares] that [you have no rights to, because you disagreed with its license conditions].

A license is not a contract. It's a grant of permissions from an owner to a recipient that details what they can and cannot do. A license can be part of a transaction, but it does not constitute a contract. Especially in the case of free software where there is no exchange of considerations.

Regardless, contracts are not required for reliance interest to apply.

This just isn't true.

Reliance requires an exchange of value. If you get something for zero value without a contract it's a gift under US commercial law.

You need to provide citations if you keep insisting otherwise because every open source licence relies on this

> A license is not a contract.

you're right, in case law exchange of considerations matters, and licenses are treated as rights grants. however, civil law does not care about considerations, and use of the object implies consent.

but that is irrelevant to our thread, because whether you breach the terms of the contract, or violate the terms of the rights grant, the different legal systems seem to have arrived at the same conclusion: it is copyright infringement

> Regardless, contracts are not required for reliance interest to apply.

was hoping that including "some other evidence" would be enough to avoid that comment

Fortunately this is completely wrong.

> Selling a toaster has an implicit warranty of merchantability.

Why would you think this is worth mentioning here?

Instead of explaining, just try to do something, that people actually use, for free, in the open, for some time. It doesn't have to be software, can be work for a nonprofit or a charity etc. I'm sure you will be enlightened.

I volunteer and I don't tell people or believe they should be grateful that an event is happening because of the volunteers. I just don't find this logic compelling in the same way that you don't find my logic compelling either.

It's not about telling other people how they should feel, it's about managing your own emotions as an unpaid maintainer of a somewhat public good facing unreasonably entitled members of public (often not even users of your product).

I'm a little confused at this comment, because the person you're replying to didn't say anything to the effect of what you're arguing against here.

That's not the argument. No one is asking users to be grateful for OSS. They just want users to not be dicks to the maintainer.

Would you continue volunteering if the beneficiaries spat in your face and cursed you out for it?

That toaster example sounds so nonsensical that I'm expecting you to deliver on your indirect promise of backing that up with evidence because of this special relationship of ours you established via interaction so these expectations are obviously implied by you commenting here.

Please continue.

Some people do not realize that they're in a parasocial relationships with content creators like streamers and youtubers and feel that it is reasonable to have expectations. For me, applying your argument, that there is some responsibility for a creator towards their users, within that domain seems farfetched. Like, I can wish that they'd continue producing worthwhile content but apart from that, how would their responsibility toward me actually manifest itself?

You don't have the impression that project managers should "be allowed" to run projects "as they see fit"?

it would save everyone a lot of hurt feelings, and unexpected surprises, if access to open source software was treated as a privilege, instead of treating it like a right

You have given the maintainer nothing. There is no relationship, no interaction. If you want to change open source code fork it and do as you please. No one owes you free labor.

> can you explain why there is no responsibility whatsoever on the part of a maintainer towards the users?

Because I don't. It's that simple. There is nothing that says I have a responsibility, and the license I release under even makes it clear and explicit that I have no responsibility. So I don't.

If you are going to claim that I do have a responsibility, then the onus is on you to present some solid, convincing, extraordinary evidence or argumentation to support that. And you haven't succeeded in doing so.

> Selling

That's part of it, right there. If I sell my open source software, then yes, I may have created an implied warranty of merchantability, even if my license disclaims that.

But if I haven't sold it to you, then no such warranty or obligation exists.

> Yes, there’s no monetary exchange here, the work is given gratis, but there’s still a relationship and an interaction here

So you admit that, but seem to ignore the idea that there's a difference between selling something and giving it away for free. I fundamentally disagree with that. If I give away something for free, the person accepting it has zero claim on me or my time. If I sell something, then there's some claim there, depending on the terms of sale that we both agreed to before I took payment.

> It doesn’t absolve people of societal obligations.

This is something you've invented out of whole cloth. There's no societal obligation to maintain something (for free) that you've given away for free. And on top of that, there's no societal obligation to deal with demanding, entitled, sometimes angry people, who want more of your time for free.

Let's actually look at it from a paid perspective. Let's say I release some software (open- or closed-source; I suppose the distinction doesn't matter for this example), and also offer paid support for that software. Some people use it without paying for support, some people pay for support. Let's say some of the people who are paying for support are demanding and rude when reporting issues and asking for fixes. Even then, I still don't have to put up with it. I can "fire" those customers if I want, either by cancelling and refunding their remaining support contract, or by deciding not to renew them when their current contract runs out.

I don't think anyone would reasonably require a company to continue to have a business relationship with a customer that is causing too many problems for them. I think the reason we are fine with this concept is because there's a remedy that gives both parties something: if we refund the customer some portion or all of what they've paid, we consider that a reasonable way to terminate that relationship. With gratis open source software, there's no such monetary arrangement, so it feels a fuzzier what the author-user relationship even is. But to me, this makes an even stronger case for the idea that open source maintainers have no obligations to their users, aside from any that they voluntarily take on, and can also decide to terminate at any point they like.

> “solid, convincing, extraordinary evidence or argumentation to support that.”

Just ordinary evidence. If there was a charity event which asked for a volunteer to organise drinks, and you volunteered, and then there were no drinks, and you said “I don’t owe you anything stop being entitled, if you want an event with drinks you can fork the idea and organise your own”, people would be unhappy and reasonably so. It’s not that you had a legal obligation to do that work, it’s that you told everyone you would and that stopped other people from doing it.

If rsync had no maintainer and someone publicly offered to take it on and maintain it, that would also block other people taking that spot. It stops people investing time effort and money into a fork or replacement to an abandoned project. If the volunteer then either didn’t do anything or wrecked it and said “I don’t owe you anything etc.” that would be bad in a similar way.

If you want to be able to tell people you are the maintainer, that the thing is maintained, and you get to control what happens to a widely used project, you can’t really stand by the position “why did people expect me to maintain it? I only told them I would maintain it, why would they believe me, that’s not fair”.

Make it clear that it’s abandonware and has no maintainer, and you can totally uphold the “not my problem, says so in the license, deal with it” position. But if your thing becomes popular then you should expect a company like RedHat to fork it into ‘redsync’ and run it their way as their project, not look to you as ‘upstream’ and sideline you completely. Which is what a lot of open source people say they want but don’t behave as if they want that. Probably because there actually is some prestige and power and status and reputation involved, even though people try to claim there isn’t.

That metaphor doesn't operate here. People are building stuff and making it available. Nobody's making a commitment. Nobody's "volunteering" for you.

Explain why the metaphor doesn’t operate here? Bonus points, don’t use the word “entitled”.

Why would I need to? Nobody volunteered. In the analogy, you found something on a shelf somewhere and decided to depend on it. The person who put it on the shelf never agreed to support you in that endeavor.

“This is abandonware”

And

“This is maintained and I am the maintainer”

Are different states. 'Maintenance' is not work-free or effortless, so the second sentence is explicitly volunteering to do some non-zero amount of work, right?

I don't see how it can be read any other way, you either have to argue that maintenance isn't work, or that "I am the maintainer" is not volunteering oneself into the role of doing that work.

If I have a garden in my yard and I say “I am the gardener of this garden”, what commitment have I made to you, a third party who just happened to be within earshot, about how much time I will spend working on the garden?

We're not talking about someone who "just happens to be within earshot" of something that is inside your private garden and not open to the public.

If you put a note on the public noticeboard saying "I have planted some things in this area of the public commons and I am the maintainer them" can you defend the idea that you are not voluntarily offering to maintain something?

Yes.

Go on then, which part of my earlier post do you disagree with, specifically?

1. The difference between ‘abandoned’ and ‘maintained’ is that ‘maintained’ is bounded at the lower end to a greater-than-zero amount of maintenance work. Not a specific amount but necessarily >0. (Without that, “maintained” and “abandoned” become the same thing and that’s absurd).

2. “I am the maintainer” can be a voluntary statement, it’s not compelled (e.g. by a gun to the head).

3. The role of ‘maintainer’ is ‘doing that >0 amount of maintenance work’.

By the time we’re arguing how much maintenance, you’re agreeing with my position. In the case of your garden, if I saw it on fire I would think it reasonable to contact you about the fire given you are the gardener. I wouldn’t contact someone who was not the gardener.

Oh, you asked me if I disagreed with your point about gardens.

That one is pretty obvious because community gardens that want to enforce a floor on amount of maintenance include that in rules that you have to agree to before they give you some of their space.

I checked the whole terms of service for GitHub and they don’t have anything about how much work I have to do on a repo once I publish it for it to stay mine.

If you’re asking me which of those statements I disagree with, 1 and 3.

Here: https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t...

> "You are responsible for keeping your Account secure."

That is a non-zero amount of work.

> "You may not use GitHub in violation of export control or sanctions laws of the United States or any other applicable jurisdiction"

That requires you to be aware of those laws and put a non-zero amount of work into complying with them.

> "You will promptly notify GitHub by contacting us through the GitHub Support portal if you become aware of any unauthorized use of, or access to, our Service through your Account,"

That is a commitment to do some work.

> "For contractual purposes, you (1) consent to receive communications from us in an electronic form via the email address you have submitted"

That is a commitment to have a working email server/account.

If you don't do these things at times which are required, Github may close your account and your repo will go with it.

> "If you’re asking me which of those statements I disagree with, 1 and 3."

And on what grounds do you disagree? That "I will do something" is not saying that you will do something, or that "letting something rot" counts as "maintaining it"?

I think we’ll have to let this comment tree rot.

Keeping your account secure is not the same as maintaining a project.

But it is a great example of the social contract!

If you fail to keep your account secure you lose your account.

If you don't maintain your project then someone forks it.

That's the only social contract.

No, it is not.

No, what is not what?

What I'm getting from you and akerl_10 is "la la la I don't want words to have meanings so I'm just going to deny that they do".

Nobody has volunteered to do any work for you at all and no matter how many words you spend saying otherwise that will not change.

Someone who says “I volunteer to do maintenance work” is volunteering to do some work, no matter how many times you say “nuh uh”.

The work need not be “for me” and nowhere did I say it was or ought to be.

This is not an interesting rebuttal, sorry.

You understand this is the opposite of your example before right?

It's like a business asking for volunteers, you saying you will, then the business demanding that you turn up when it suits them and you not being allowed to say "no"

It's an outrageous position to take.

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