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There's a certain "buyer beware" quality to open-source stuff, and I think that's okay. You can see the sausage, after all. Maybe I just have low expectations
by mbg721 5y ago
There's a certain "buyer beware" quality to open-source stuff, and I think that's okay. You can see the sausage, after all. Maybe I just have low expectations, but I don't think there's a perpetual obligation on the part of creators to maintain the thing they released into the wild.
- marcosdumay 5y ago> There's a certain "buyer beware" quality to open-source stuff It's not a quality of open source. It's a quality of specific things, and not of other things. Just like with proprietary software. The only difference is that you need to beware a little less with open source, so more people are willing to.
- domador 5y agoWhile I greatly appreciate open source, I don't think I can generally "beware a little less" with open source. On the plus side, I can generally be confident that an open-source program will not disappear and become completely unavailable to society. On the minus side, for less popular open-source projects, the usual lack of a reliable software-development business model makes me wary of the likelihood that a the project will keep being reliably maintained in the near term and will stay alive in the long term. Personally, I place greater trust and hope in specialized, usually-closed-source programs sold by small companies that are financially invested in maintaining and improving those programs. I doubt that it'd be easy for an abandoned, mildly popular open-source project to be revived by someone other than its creators. Whenever such a project is abandoned by its creators, I tend to lose hope that it will ever be revived, that new features will ever be added, or that existing bugs will ever be removed.