Comment by siscia
5 years ago
Dude, sorry to break this to you! But basically any widely used software is supported by major companies just to avoid this problem.
Libraries, compilers and kernels alike.
If you want to rely on software being there, you should be ready to pay for people to support it.
> This is because as a community we have realized that we don't sell libraries, we sell stuff build with them, so we all win when we share.
It is clear to me that is not true anymore. It is really hard to find open source project without clear direct financial incentives.
Again, as a community, we should start to pay for the components we use.
Companies should contribute their fair share by supporting open sources projects monetarily, definitely!
But that is a different issue, from the behavioral standards we as a community uphold implicitly, and which are broken by pulling a "left-pad" incident.
I believe we should not demand free work from people only because they were nice enough to push their code on GitHub and let stranger use it for free.
I work in open source as well at both day job and for "fun" but I fix the issue that I want and if people want something from me as author of whatever, there is going to be a money talk.
To take the metaphor from a different user on this topic: "Its completely ok to not hold the door open for someone, but its extremely impolite to drop them into their face."
The author created a project and advertised it to people, if they don't want to maintain it anymore, sure, no problem.
But deleting it to spite others is considered a d* move.