Comment by stale2002
7 years ago
He is correct that open source developers don't "owe" anyone anything. But this is kinda missing the point.
The point is that if you have a bad development process, people are going to have issues. And these issues are real.
Even though you have no "obligation" to solve these problems that you have created for other people, you shouldn't be surprised if people bring them up, or perhaps even fork the project with a bunch of other people who also have problems with you.
Sure, the community does not own your time, but neither do you own the community. A community is fully within it right to do something else with their time, or convince other people to contribute to a different project.
> Even though you have no "obligation" to solve these problems that you have created for other people...
Publishers of open source code don't create problems for other people. People who accept that code into their projects assume those problems for themselves.
If an open source package has bugs in the forest and nobody is around to install it...
This attitude is just an excuse to hand wave away genuine criticism of shoddy engineering.
After yesterday's NPM fiasco sorry but it is your project. You should fix the problems or don't release it out in the world.
I believe your last two paragraphs are exactly what he's suggesting: complainers are free to fork and work on a better process if they're so inclined.
In his post he stated as follow:
> But kindly don't burn the community down on your way out, with self-serving proclamations
This is him complaining about what the community is doing. The community is free to do what it wants, and he is making some sort of statement as if he owns the community in some way, and therefore can decide what is or is not "burning it down".
Convincing other people to leave the closure community (IE, burning it down) is a perfectly reasonable thing to do if there really are problems with it.
Complaining about what the community is doing, is him making the same mistake that he is complaining about other people doing.
By this logic you are making the same mistake as both.
1) The problem is that not every company has the resources to maintain its own fork of the code base. Some of us are one man bands, work in quite small teams of less than 3 or 4 developers. This idea that people have the resources to maintain their own fork of the code is crazy.
2) Two it creates fragmentation. Fragmentation creates defects and incompatibilities.
As I gotten older I pretty much realised that unless it is backed by a professional company I am not using it. There has been consistent stream of fiasco, drama and general unprofessional bullshit in the realm of open source I am quite happy I've mostly stuck to doing the majority of my work with .NET and SQL Server.