Comment by kube-system
11 days ago
That is ridiculous. If you buy a sandwich for a homeless person, you do not need to warn them that you won't give them another one tomorrow. If you think generosity is an obligation of slavery, you have your morals backwards.
However, almost every open source license actually DOES warn that support may end. See the warranty clause.
If you give them a free sandwich every day for 500 days.....yeah, you should probably tell them you're not coming tomorrow.
Okay, well they did.
The parallel is what's ridiculous..because of the social understanding. Even if you face a sandwich every day, the offer could end anytime..a one off surely doesn't set expectations.
With open source it does. If an indie open sources and get a baby or lose interest, it is understood as fair to suddenly stop maintenance.
When a company surfs on the open source wave to get contributions, grow penetration, then smoothly slows maintenance and announces to get a license, that's gaming the open source community.
See the numerous cases of popular open source repo where the parent or new parent company took over to gain the user base without any respect for the maintenance if not development aspect: community fork and take over the community.
Mariadb, a more recent illustrative example of that is the hashicorp drama that occured when investors decided it was time to gear towards profit at the detriment of the community that largely contributed to the tools.