Comment by Dilettante_
8 hours ago
>it is not okay to consider that this labor fell from the sky and is a gift, and that the people/person behind are just doing it for their own enjoyments
Yes it absolutely is. That is the exact social contract people 100% willingly enter by releasing something as Free and Open Source. They do give it as a gift, in exchange for maybe the tiny bit of niche recognition that comes with it, and often times out of simple generosity. Is that really so incredible?
The problem is more so maintenance.
The expectation of FOSS is that the users and maintainer work together to resolve bug fixes/features/security issues.
However many companies will dump these issues to the maintainer and take it for granted when they are resolved.
It's not a sustainable model, and will lead to burnout/unmaintained libraries.
If the companies don't have the engineering resources/specialization to complete bug fixes/features, they should sponsor the maintainers.
It’s OK to say “No” or “Pay me and I’ll do it right now” to companies doing this.
I 100% agree with this. It also is 100% OK to fork aggressively and patch yourself.
(And on the flipside, nothing is owed for a bugfix the maintainer made out of their own free will. Again, a gift.)
2 replies →
Correct, maintainers can say that and get shamed.
And it leads to unmaintained libraries, since companies don't want to pay.
At some point, is open sourcing your work a liability?
8 replies →
A company finding a bug and opening an issue on an open source project _is_ contributing.
What happens next is completely irrelevant. The maintainer can 100% decide to just ignore the issue or close it.
Opening issues doesn't create unmaintained software. In fact it helps.
No the expectation of FOSS is that code is provided AS-IS with NO WARRANTY because that’s what it says in the license.
People's expectations are not constrained by the license. They are free to exercise a sense of entitlement beyond the terms of the contract and empirically they often do. The license does not prohibit them from engaging with the authors or maintainers for any reason whatsoever, including requesting free labor.
You could perhaps add a clause in the license that restricts this behavior but then it would no longer be FOSS.
Agreed. Supporting open source maintainers is a great idea in general, but shaming people for using something according to the exact license terms it was released with is getting old.
It's crazy to expect someone to pay for something that you're giving them for free.
Correct, but if there's a bug/enhancement/support they want, it's perfectly reasonable to ask for compensation for it.
A natural solution for this kind of problem would be either a private or public grants program. Critical infrastructure built by random uncompensated people... ideally there would be some process for evaluating what is critical and compensating that person for continued maintenance.