Comment by account42
9 days ago
The problem is that open source projects are not just code but also communities and some authority over what ends up getting packaged in distros. The obligation is not to make people's experiences worse than what they would be had you not contributed and doing it for free doesn't absolve you of that.
> open source projects are not just code but also communities
No. Open source projects are open source projects. Open sourcing my code does not mean at all that I have to build a community.
> The obligation is
There is no obligation. Again I don't say that authors should be jerks (obviously they shouldn't), but what seems very unclear to too many people is that users are not entitled to anything at all.
Because you choose to depend on something that someone provided for free does not mean they now owe you anything. Just like if I donate 20 dollars to a charity, it doesn't mean that I must now volunteer for that charity.