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No, the person giving free free food here did not go up to people's houses saying here is free food still, eat it cause it is yummy and safe. The people getting

No, the person giving free free food here did not go up to people's houses saying here is free food still, eat it cause it is yummy and safe. The people getting the free food showed up cause they felt entitled, grabbed whatever they could find and said... oh, this isn't the free food that I'm used to getting here... oh, and I forgot to read the sign that has been there all along.

shadowgovt 5y ago
This analogy doesn't work the way you want it to. What you are describing would be literally illegal. The person who put up the free food and the sign, after it was proven that they willfully poisoned the food (which is the only way I can interpret intentionally encoding an infinite loop in your testing library), would be liable for assault. You cannot just put up a sign that says "taker beware" to indemnify yourself from liability, especially after establishing the pattern that the food is safe. If you ever wondered why grocery stores throw out perfectly good food (and sometimes padlock their dumpsters) rather than donate it to shelters, it's because this is how society works. They have to be clear that even food being thrown away is not intended to be free for the taking because if a pattern becomes established of people eating safe food out of a grocery store dumpster and one day that food is not safe, the grocery store can be held liable for injuries. Even if the grocery store never wanted anyone to use that food. The hard part would be proving the store intentionally poisoned it... But if that proof were made, the law is clear on who is responsible for the harm caused, and it's not the people eating out of the dumpster. The underlying philosophical principle that underpins all of this legal precedent is "Don't intentionally cause harm." Marak broke that principle. Thank God Marak was only writing npm libraries and didn't own a grocery store. This entire story, from the initial changes through the breakages through third parties intervening to mitigate their services being used to cause the breakages through other third parties stepping in to take responsibility to continue maintaining the code that had become vital, is one big open source community success story. The community interpreted intentional harm as damage and routed around it. And that was always one of the intended benefits of the open source approach, right? That the creator of the software can't ruin your day because they feel like it? Whether that creator is an evil corporation refusing to open their proprietary code, or a rogue actor deciding to take a sledgehammer to the pipeline... Open source mitigates the harm caused by both.

shadowgovt 5y ago

This analogy doesn't work the way you want it to. What you are describing would be literally illegal. The person who put up the free food and the sign, after it was proven that they willfully poisoned the food (which is the only way I can interpret intentionally encoding an infinite loop in your testing library), would be liable for assault. You cannot just put up a sign that says "taker beware" to indemnify yourself from liability, especially after establishing the pattern that the food is safe. If you ever wondered why grocery stores throw out perfectly good food (and sometimes padlock their dumpsters) rather than donate it to shelters, it's because this is how society works. They have to be clear that even food being thrown away is not intended to be free for the taking because if a pattern becomes established of people eating safe food out of a grocery store dumpster and one day that food is not safe, the grocery store can be held liable for injuries. Even if the grocery store never wanted anyone to use that food. The hard part would be proving the store intentionally poisoned it... But if that proof were made, the law is clear on who is responsible for the harm caused, and it's not the people eating out of the dumpster. The underlying philosophical principle that underpins all of this legal precedent is "Don't intentionally cause harm." Marak broke that principle. Thank God Marak was only writing npm libraries and didn't own a grocery store. This entire story, from the initial changes through the breakages through third parties intervening to mitigate their services being used to cause the breakages through other third parties stepping in to take responsibility to continue maintaining the code that had become vital, is one big open source community success story. The community interpreted intentional harm as damage and routed around it. And that was always one of the intended benefits of the open source approach, right? That the creator of the software can't ruin your day because they feel like it? Whether that creator is an evil corporation refusing to open their proprietary code, or a rogue actor deciding to take a sledgehammer to the pipeline... Open source mitigates the harm caused by both.