Comment by teddyh
4 months ago
> 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.
> I completely disagree. Your hypothetical situation sounds absolutely like entitlement to me.
Do you mean to say that you think that it would be completely socially acceptable for a maintainer to act as in my hypothetical exaggerated hyperbolic situation? Would you respect anyone who actually did that? Would you remain friends with anyone who did that? Really?
Assuming it's FOSS, then yes, a maintainer is entirely in their rights to stop maintaining their software for any reason or for no reason at all. If you as a user don't like that, you can fork it, that's the norm for FOSS.
As for respecting someone who responded in that specific wording, no, it's unprofessional. But that's orthogonal to whether or not it's entitlement to expect a regular release cadence from a FOSS project that you have no commercial relationship with.
As for remaining friends, likewise, that's orthogonal to the topic being discussed.
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