Comment by j-pb
5 years ago
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.