Comment by toyg
5 years ago
> The actix author almost certainly (unless they deploy their own kernel)
... or use Windows / MacOS / Solaris / any other commercial OS he paid for...
> by engaging in open source you engage in a social contract
You heck. You simply allow other people to use your work as they see fit. That's it. The only contract is the license, and the license is very explicit in denying the existence of any other tie, explicit or implicit.
When you hold the door open for somebody you don't sign shit, yet it's implicit that you don't swing the door in their face.
But you don't hold a door: you are dropping a package on the street and letting people pick it up. Anyone can reuse the cardboard, paint it red, stack it up with other packages, or hang it on their livingroom walls... but there is no guarantee that the package won't contain a bomb, that the cardboard was made by eco-friendly methods, or that it will last one second after getting dropped on the streets.
That's the bare minimum of what you can do, which really just constitutes dumping your code on GitHub, slapping an unmaintained label in the readme, and calling it a day
But we can go beyond that, and start to do more work, and make grander social promises. Calls for a "community" come with the implicit agreement that this codebase now exists for more than just the one person who initialized it. And that you've pushed it into the public, and requested people to treat your repo as the repo, you've taken on certain responsibilities, and made some implicit, or explicit, promises.
Sometimes the job is thrust upon the maintainer accidentally (eg Linus), and sometimes it is requested (apparently in this case?)
But nonetheless it's a natural function of the OSS community, and there are ways to deny the responsibility appropriately, and inappropriately.
But it's there is much more nuance to this than dumping a box, or reading a legal contract (which is never representative of social contracts; it's just the bare minimum to avoid responsibility in the eyes of a lawsuit.)
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Yes and pushing the archive button is saying "I won't produce any more packages sorry."
What they did was climb through everyones window to get the cardboard box back, just as with the npm leftpad incident.
Stop painting the narative like people demand some volunteer to do more free work, when all they do is ask to not be actively sabotaged.
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