Comment by Hendrikto

I think you are missing the point of legal vs societal obligations and your analogy is equally bad. Minio's sold you this free light bulb and they also freely offered the service to upgrade it to the newest version every time a new lightbulb was released. There are many light bulb brands out there, some paid, some free, most of them also offer the service to upgrade the lightbulb automatically, even the free ones.

Then Minio decided to disable the feature to upgrade the lightbulb automatically, the code to update it is still there, they just don't want to do it anymore. Conveniently there is a Minio+ enterprise plan that has this feature. But hey! they tell you that you can easily set up your own server to update your lightbulb automatically. And most enterprise clients or people who have Minio lightbulbs in their office will do that.

But for single enthusiasts who don't have a server because they are just running a Minio lightbulb in their shed it's a bad situation, because if they knew this from the beginning they would have gone with another free lightbulb that updated automatically.

In short: Minio has the legal right to do whatever they want, people using minio have the right to be pissed. It's an all around bad publicity stunt and if I was a Minio investor I would really wonder why they are trying to piss off their loyal user base for a quick buck.

OK - I live in a place that's snowy for a lot of the year. I shovel not only my sidewalk but my neighbours' several houses on both sides. People are really happy and grateful. Over the years Mr. Johnson the senior on a fixed pension next door loses mobility and is really appreciative I keep his walk clean. The couple next to him has a new baby and a clear sidewalk helps them load up all the accompanying gear into the car. My snowbird neighbours are happy that their walk is accessible when they're out of town. The dad who walks several kids to school is happy there's less snow to trudge through twice a day (in both directions). The mail carrier is less likely to slip and is grateful. Dog walkers and (crazy) winter joggers don't even consciously realize the improvement but still benefit.

Then I decide to stop. It doesn't really matter why, I wasn't getting paid or had not made any sort of formal agreement or promise, I just don't want to do it anymore. Now I shovel my sidewalk to the property line exactly and that's it. Hey, that's my legal obligation; I don't need to do any more! Mr. Johnson now has a lot more trouble getting out of his house; we see him a lot less. The baby is crying while new mom slips around trying to load up strollers and diaper bags and a car seat. The snowbirds just got fined by city bylaw for not clearing their walk. That dad's school trip is just a little longer, colder and unpleasant.

Hey, this isn't my fault! All those people took my effort for granted; I never promised to shovel their walks! They have no basis to judge me! But you better believe that this decision reduced their assessment that I'm a "good neighbour". Community is built mostly on implicit agreements, norms and conventions that are established through practice & conduct over time. You're arguing the right/wrong of this in the face of legal formalizations, while others are just saying it is a fact, not weighing the benefits and obligations.

I don't see how "basic commodity required for life" is a necessary criteria for any ethical standards to apply at all. This is about trust, community and how to be a good project steward.

Electricity is not a basic commodity required for life. It is convenient for sure.

" So offering something for free and then rescinding later is treated worse than never offering anything for free at all!"

This is true plenty of times. In particular, if you violate social expectations/etc, you will often see this.

For example, here's an easy case:

I am about to go plant a bunch of trees.

A neighbor sees me going to do it, and offers to do it for me for free, because they like to do it.

I say cool. They can even say "just so you know, i'm not your contractor, blah blah blah" or whatever. Doesn't matter.

I go do something else with my time.

A week later, they did half the job, and quit, or they did the whole job and made a hash of it, or whatever.

1. It wouldn't make sense for me to expect them to fail or stop doing it or do it poorly just because it was free. Nor plan for them to fail.

2. Most people would still complain even though they paid nothing, and are arguably no worse off (depending on the options you pick) then when they started.

3. Most people would definitely feel like it was worse than doing nothing.

Now, in this example you could argue it's the poor quality/stopping halfway through that is causing this result, but you would IMHO see the same result even if they did a great job, but stopped after doing 90% of it, leaving me definitely no worse off, and probably much better off.

In the end, people's expectations are emotional and not simply rational.

Of course they are freeloading - and users often suck - but your latter doesn't follow.

It's fair in the singular case (IE if this is the only open source/free thing you use), but especially as you are dealing with more and more things like this (IE use lots of open source), it is totally irrational to expect them to plan for any of 50 open source projects they use to stop at any time.

It violates general good faith expectations. Just because someone is doing something for free doesn't mean you expect them to fail or stop - The cost is fairly orthogonal to most people's expectations. I don't expect any package in my linux distro to just stop existing or working at any time.

Sure, it would be sensible to plan for eventual failure of things you depend on, but it's not rational to expect people to plan for random failure of any of the things they depend on at any time, regardless of the cost of those things.

More to the point, it's not entitlement on their part to avoid sitting around waiting for the other shoe to drop all the time :)

The projects also often have the perspective of "it shouldn't be tha big a thing" but that's because they ignore they are not the only thing happening in their users world.

Github is awash with accounts with zero contributions to anything who use it to lobby for their personal requirements.

I do this frequently. To prevent vendor lock in and allow us to easily pivot if pricing gets out line. We pay to support the project and get technical support when needed. Considering how little we use technical support. It should be a good deal for the company.

For one: Using open source version often is a lot simpler. Commercial versions are hidden behind authentication and other weird systems to download. User experience can be a lot better.

Then there are ideological reasons: Purposly trying to make the open source version sustainable.

And then reduced lockin etc. by not using Enterprise only features by accident/convenience, which leaves the door open to leave the contract.

Because I want to give a project money but also want to make 5000% sure the entire thing is in github, working, the latest, compiling and that we can do all of that all of the time? What is strange about that?

In my experience, you start using the open source version, realize you could benefit from paid support, so you "buy a license" and get your support -- but then you never have a big enough reason to do the lift to the commercial version.

> Why isn't there similar expectations for users of Open source? That is be ready to take over yourself if maintainers do not want to do something anymore?

Of course there is. Which is why many hostile projects get forked.

"That is the beauty of OSS", I hear you say. And I agree, but most people aren't developers. Even those who are, might not be familiar with the technology to continue maintaining the project. And even those who are, will still need time and effort to understand the codebase at a level that they're comfortable with maintaining it. And even those who are interested in all of that, might not do a good job at it.

So, ultimately, it is a very small subset of users who would not only have the capability to continue maintenance, but would manage to do as well as the original maintainers for the benefit of the entire community.

Most people saw an interesting piece of software, gave it a try and enjoyed it, and, if the project is successful, would probably like to continue using it. When the original developer ignores or is actively hostile towards these users, you're saying that they have no right to be upset about it? That's what I find ridiculous.

Yes, some people can be demanding and annoying, but that's true regardless if they're a paying customer, a contributor, or a "freeloader". The way you deal with this is by communicating and setting clear boundaries, not by alienating your user base.

I think you are digging in a little too hard here. If someone offers a capability that you don't have, and you build that into something you use, then saying that they should be ready for it to go away at any time and be happy to have had it, seems a little too much.

If there had never been an offer, they would not have built around it, and would have found another solution and, even if harder or more inconvenient, learned how to use that and built around that. Sure, no one is obligated to continue to provide them with the product, but saying that they are being unreasonable for expecting a little bit of warning time before having support pulled is a bit unrealistic.

I know we have done the metaphors to death already, but let's try another one: imagine if someone gave you a ride to work every day for years and one morning they didn't show up and you couldn't get in touch with them. You should have had a backup plan, and you shouldn't have depended on them, but it will take you a while to find a car and rearrange your schedule and learn how to drive or whatever you have to do, and all they had to do was notify you a month or two earlier that they wouldn't be able to do it anymore.

You're more annoying than the people you complain about.

> It certainly does.

No, it doesn't. Yes, there are general safety regulations in any country, but there are no hard rules as to what "satisfactory" or "fit for purpose" means.

My analogy was contrived to make a point. Of course serving actual feces is not "satisfactory". But I imagine that you can extrapolate my analogy into an infinite number of possibilities where someone who once enjoyed certain services or products can find them not "satisfactory" anymore. That is a commonplace situation in any marketplace, and it is perfectly valid for the person on the receiving end to be upset about it.

The one hole you can poke at my analogy, which I anticipated, is that there is (typically) no financial transaction between users and developers of free software. But my response to this is that a financial transaction is not a requirement for the social contract to be established with users of any product or service, regardless of its distribution or business model. Those users can still expect a certain level of service, and understandably so. This expectation exists whether the person is a customer or not.

A closer analogy might be a community kitchen, or garden. But it really makes no difference to my argument.

The free software philosophy is agnostic to how software is monetized. It's true that it is more difficult to do so than with proprietary software, but it's certainly not impossible. Many companies have been built and thrive on producing free software. The crucial thing, regardless of the business model, is to treat all your users with the same amount of respect, dedication, and honesty. The moment you stop doing that, don't be surprised when the community pushes back. That's on you, not on "entitled" users.