← Back to context

Comment by bsoqk

8 hours ago

If I give away food I have a duty not to poison you. It doesn’t matter you didn’t pay for it.

Others are eating it and are fine, chances are you’re allergic. Fortunately all ingredients are listed, you can check - or even modify the recipe yourself.

  • > Fortunately all ingredients are listed

    How does this translate to the vim situation?

    • The point would be that it's open source. And "chances are you're allergic" translates to "your use case / expectations are unusual". But in my opinion the analogy doesn't hold well at all, because destroying a persistent undo file without warning is pretty obviously incorrect and unexpected behavior.

It's not poison, it's a broken feature. And you have the source code. Fix it if you like.

  • Sure, and then have it break again the next time upstream pushes a change. Or have something else break because upstream doesn't care about breaking things that I'm relying on.

    The only way to "fix" this from a source code perspective would be to fork Neovim.

Software isn’t food.

  • You must feel clever completely missing the point on purpose like that.

    • "Your analogy is false because the two things you are comparing are not literally the same, dear sir!" is such a classic Internet discussion trope that it must have a name. If it doesn't, can I please name it? Maybe Perfect Analogy Fallacy?

      7 replies →

    • Food is one of the more heavily regulated industries out there. Most other general business types are less regulated than food.

  • Yes, everyone is aware of that. The parent poster was bringing up the example of food to demonstrate that our society does not agree that giving something away for free doesn't mean you have no obligation as to potential adverse effects of the thing.

    • Analogies like this don’t work when comparing against heavily regulated industry.

      Neovim being free software is a lot different than United Airlines giving me a free flight or my doctor giving me a free consultation.

      It’s very true that you can go to civil court and make a claim that a business or individual harmed you. If you do that with Neovim the judge is going to pretty quickly read bullet point #7 of the Apache 2.0 license, you’re going to struggle to prove any kind of mal-intent, you’re going to tell the judge that you paid $0 for the software, and you’ll be pretty quickly sent along your way with no damages awarded.

      2 replies →

    • That is why software should have very large liability for anything software they release do? Say your software due to bug destroys some document. Surely you should pay damages caused by such bug even if quite high?