Comment by okareaman
5 years ago
This whole issue is confusing to me. It's like no one ever heard of fork. It's hardly mentioned in the comments. The author owes people what they paid him to do, which is nothing. If he wants to go unsafe and fast that's his business. I don't have to ride with him. I can make a copy of his car for free and drive it the way I want.
I think this is a case of the end justifies the means. The end: get the maintainer to change his code the way I want. The means: bully and abuse him to force him into it because that sometimes works.
At some point open source got morphed into being about free as in beer and gratis volunteer work by generous souls. But its origin and what the licenses themselves are about are freedom to read and freedom to modify. The entitlement that has crept in and the social contracts that seem to have formed around expectations for people writing Free code are concerning.
Shame on people who forget this, and demand more than those freedoms from authors who so generously grant them to others. Based upon what I’ve read, I would have checked out from this project as the author well before they did given the harassment they’ve apparently been getting for not merging PRs into their repo.