Comment by evanelias
4 months ago
> 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.
> a maintainer is entirely in their rights [but] it's unprofessional
It is entirely reasonable for users to expect maintainers to behave respectably. Users may not have any legal rights to be treated professionally, but it does not change the reasonableness of the expectation.
> But that's orthogonal
It is not orthogonal. We are not discussing any legal rights; we are only discussing what is socially acceptable behavior from maintainers.
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