Comment by teddyh
17 hours ago
> Creators / maintainers owe us nothing
I would argue that they do, in fact, owe us something.
All people who make public announcements are in effect holding a conversation with the public, until such time as they publicly announce its end. A person in a conversation is socially obligated to make reasonable attempts to speak and respond to other people’s questions, comments, and concerns. If they don’t, or suddenly stop, they have abandoned the social etiquette of a conversation. This is not the public “being entitled” (as some like to claim), but is instead the quite reasonable expectations of the public who was led into a conversation with somebody who did not, or ceased to, respect the social rules.
(I should not need to say this, but in addition to being a user of many software projects, I am myself a maintainer of software publicly available – in official Linux distributions, even. I do not think that I ask my fellow maintainers for much – only a smidgen of respect for their users.)
(Previously: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22073908#22074287>)
> All people who make public announcements are in effect holding a conversation with the public
No, they're not. Unlike a conversation, a public announcement is a one-way, one-to-many communication.
> A person in a conversation is socially obligated to make reasonable attempts to speak and respond to other people’s questions, comments, and concerns.
In a social setting, with a limited number of participants, sure. But in an internet forum, with an unlimited number of participants, people fail to make reasonable attempts to respond to the entirety of others' comments on a fairly regular basis. And there is absolutely no widespread social obligation otherwise.
But this is all entirely irrelevant anyway, because a software project is not the same thing as a conversation in the first place:
> the quite reasonable expectations of the public who was led into a conversation with somebody who did not, or ceased to, respect the social rules.
Using someone's free software is quite clearly not even remotely the same thing as being "led into a conversation", so there's no reason to expect the same social obligations.
> respond to the entirety of others' comments
You are mischaracterizing what I wrote. I did not say the entirety of others’s comments; I explicitly wrote only “make reasonable attempts”.
> Using someone's free software is quite clearly not even remotely the same thing as being "led into a conversation", so there's no reason to expect the same social obligations.
Users are still completely reasonable in expecting something. Consider my hypothetical situation I described in the second paragraph here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38310060>.
> I did not say the entirety of others’s comments; I explicitly wrote only “make reasonable attempts”.
OK, but that's still clearly not the widespread social norm in internet forums. For better or worse, it's quite common for commenters to not make any reasonable attempt to respond to sub-threads.
> Users are still completely reasonable in expecting something. Consider my hypothetical situation
I completely disagree. Your hypothetical situation sounds absolutely like entitlement to me.
3 replies →
The tax you’re describing is exactly why maintainers burn out and why open source projects die, or worse - they’re never born. The only way to win is not to play.
It is very similar to club activities and volunteer work. People burn out fast when they stop finding value in the work. It is exceptional common with instructors where say parents pay to a club for their children membership, where the parents might not be fully aware that the cost of operation would be significant higher if the people involved were paid employees rather than people volunteering their time. One has to regularly remind people about the social aspects that are the foundation of such activity, and that the activity can only exist when enough people join in and help. When that fails you get very high burnout rates which quickly can cause a death spiral of the whole activity.
Normally such activity comes with one year commitments. Leaving in the middle of things unannounced and without warning would be breaking the social etiquette. No one is forced to work but there are social expectations and obligations in social activities. How much open source project is similar to such activity, and how much social expectation there are will depend on the context. For example, if you are volunteering as treasurer to a large open source project, the expectations are going to be very similar to that of a club, as will the burn out if the person doing the work don't get value from it.
A person in a conversation is socially obligated to make reasonable attempts to speak and respond to other people’s questions, comments, and concerns.
Slaves and servants and subjects have the obligation you describe.
It is the nature of their bondage.
Asking questions and complaining and unsolicited opining are hallmarks privilege.
To the extent a social contract is a contract, it requires both parties to receive consideration.
Comparing mainainers being socially obligated to respond to questions to actual slavery, is unseemly.
If people don’t want the social burden of being a public person or even the relatively small burden of having a public project, they have the option of not being public.
Or -- stay with me -- they have the option of running their public project in the manner and with the level of effort they want. If you don't like that, you are free to run your own projects according to your own standards.
13 replies →
The degree to which you demand obligation is the degree to which you make equivalence.
Why only two options? It seems limiting the options of engagement only serves to create a false dichotomy for the purposes of supporting your argument.
If the only two options are to become obligated to the public or not to engage at all, what a sad world this would be. Thankfully, there are many, many alternate options in the reality we share, even if not in your imagined reality.
2 replies →
The social etiquette is set by the license the code is distributed under, which says things like "THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE PROGRAM “AS IS” WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE" in all caps.
That social etiquette indicates that maintainers don't owe you shit.
That’s the legal warranty disclaimer. It has nothing to do with support, security fixes, or future development, and certainly does not speak about simply being reasonably responsive when being contacted by users.
Also, and this might be hard for overly rules-obsessed people to understand, this is not a legal matter. It is a matter of social etiquette. I of course agree that nobody is legally owed anything. But this is not about legality.
> It has nothing to do with support, security fixes, or future development, and certainly does not speak about simply being reasonably responsive when being contacted by users.
Actually, if you re-read the GP, all of those points are covered. You just don't like the answer.
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That's not the social etiquette, that's the legal situation.
Correct. The relevant social etiquette here is "don't look a gift horse in the mouth."