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I believe the opposite. If you're making money off of it, then you do have a moral obligation to support it, at least to the point where they can use it under t
by s73v3r 11y ago
I believe the opposite. If you're making money off of it, then you do have a moral obligation to support it, at least to the point where they can use it under the original circumstances they were sold it under. The idea that one could charge for a product and completely disappear with the customer's money is extremely unprofessional, and quite frankly makes it much harder for the rest of us to sell software.
- diggan 11y agoSure, as I said in the comment before, agreeing to stick around and charge for a service then running away is clearly a dick move. Charging for something monthly and then one month decide you want to do other things, is not a dick move. If you pay me to clean your apartment for two months but the third month I decide to do something else instead, do I have to keep cleaning your apartment?
- markdown 11y ago> Charging for something monthly and then one month decide you want to do other things, is not a dick move. It most certainly is a dick move if you know you have customers who depend on the service. To avoid being a dick, provide your users more notice. > If you pay me to clean your apartment for two months but the third month I decide to do something else instead, do I have to keep cleaning your apartment? Of course you don't, but to avoid being a dick, provide adequate notice, with adequete being enough time to find a replacement. If I had a party on the 2nd day of month 3 with an expectation you'd be cleaning the apartment on day 1 only to be told on the 1st that you wouldn't be doing it, that would be a dick move. ------ Essentially it comes down to providing enough notice to find a replacement. The time needed to do that obviously depends on the service, but I can think of many cases where a months notice is less than acceptable.
- diggan 11y agoThe service is a side project. It's something half baked (maybe not always half baked, but often) you did because you thought it was fun to do. If someone is depending on my side project, I'm not gonna take responsibility for you making a bad decision to depend on a service that people make as a side project. Of course, if we're talking "real" projects/services, it's different. But now we're talking about side projects. Something you do on the side. I'm not against letting your users know that you're shutting down with a good amount of time before. What I'm against is that someone saying (the linked blogpost for example) that I HAVE TO maintain my side project because someone decided to depend on it.
- thetmkay 11y agoIt's a matter of communication and self-representation. You may think it's naive for someone to rely on your side project, but from their perspective they may never have known it was a side project. It may just look like a normal legitimate paid service, with a reasonable expectation of duty of care. A consequence of the plethora of great dev tools/services out there is that it's relatively easy to produce a professional looking website, and thus increasingly difficult to tell whether said site represents a business or a side project (especially with wannabe start-ups, who commonly promote and advertise MVP services with landing pages only to pivot soon after). There should be some accountability for properly 'cleaning up/closing up' a business. I don't think the OP said anything about having to maintain in perpetuity - just that there is an implicit social contract (and sometimes legal) to clean up a side project with due care when you take money. In an ideal world, there would always be some care - but realistically speaking, the most appropriate line in the sand is paid/free.
- s73v3r 11y agoNobody gives a shit that it's a "side project". They paid good money to you for it. If it really was half baked, then why the fuck are you taking money for it in the first place. "I'm not against letting your users know that you're shutting down with a good amount of time before. What I'm against is that someone saying (the linked blogpost for example) that I HAVE TO maintain my side project because someone decided to depend on it." No. It stopped being a side project, and became a real project the second you started taking money for it.
- s73v3r 11y agoThat's not a valid comparison. I bought your software with the expectation that it would continue to work, even if I wasn't continuing to pay you.