Comment by teddyh
4 months ago
> I don't "keep" doing anything
Fair; I have edited.
> this social obligation on the part of open source maintainers you seem the believe in is not a thing.
Many people do think it’s a thing, though. See my links to past threads, where I am far from alone in my opinion. See also various Linux Distributions’ rules for maintainers.
Those rules are generally not put in place by users though, they're put in place by other maintainers right?
By other maintainers, yes, but for the benefit of users. Also, if these minimal levels of decency (which I suggest) are in fact so onerous to surely drive all maintainers to burnout (as frequently claimed, even in this thread), why, then, are they mandated by distributions?
> Many people do think it’s a thing, though. See my links to past threads, where I am far from alone in my opinion. See also various Linux Distributions’ rules for maintainers.
Against my better judgement, I read through the first thread you linked to.
If there are any substantial number of people writing there that agree with your position that open source maintainers have a "social obligation" -- or anything similar -- to the users of the software they give away for free, I missed it.
Most of the replies to your comments I saw there were people trying to explain the same things we are trying to convey here, followed by your steadfast refusal to deal with reality. I mean, at one point you responded to a quoted section of an MIT-style license and said:
> That text does not disclaim support, security bugfixes, and future development. On the contrary, all three of those things are probably either heavlily implied or outright stated to be available on the project web site.
... when the first two lines of the quoted license does exactly that. To wit:
> ... PROVIDE THE PROGRAM "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND ...
... which means the copyright holders disclaim support, bug fixes, and future development. That's literally what providing something "AS IS" means. It is provided as it currently is.
I don't think continuing to engage with you here on an even more nebulous concept ('social obligation') when you are unable or unwilling to objectively deal with written text is going to be a good use of my time. Have a nice day.
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I have no problem debating people who have positions grounded in reality and who appear to be acting in good faith. In this thread you’ve:
* Instead of addressing the substance of brudger’s argument[0], you attempted to tone police his comment and then set up a false dichotomy.
* Accused me[1] of “conflating legal rights with what is socially or ethically right, and I think this is a dubious rhetorical trick.” when I had argued no such thing, and it was in fact you who were engaged in dubious rhetorical tricks[2] as all I had written at that point is that people have the option of running open source projects on their own terms.
All of this in support of the position that people who give away their labor for free have a further obligation to give away more free labor because…checks notes… you say so.
0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43143719
2 - see, I do believe in social niceties. Isn’t it much nicer to say someone engaged in “dubious rhetorical tricks” than to say what you actually did in that comment, which is lie?
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