Epistemic Status: Just musing out loud, I'm not sure I even believe this but it's one approach to the problem. Open source software has some pretty severe netw

Epistemic Status: Just musing out loud, I'm not sure I even believe this but it's one approach to the problem. Open source software has some pretty severe networks effects. There's only so many people who are going to maintain a package for MacOs, in affect different package managers are going to be competing for those volunteer maintainers, and there's a pretty big first mover advantage. (there's only one wikipedia, despite it being pretty easy to make a new wiki, volunteers are the resource projects compete over) If you're an open source maintainer who's part of a project driven largely by volunteer labor like this, well you've got to consider the fact that your project existing means that other project will have a lot harder time getting started. It's not as simple as "we're all volunteers so be thankful for what you get" because just by existing your project is consuming a finite resource, volunteers, sponsorships, awareness, etc. Your project existing might be taking up space that a much better project could fill. Of course if it's that much better it probably will eventually anyway, but still. So I don't know, try to make sure your project is the best it could be, and try to build something that will last rather than chasing new features? I hear a lot about entitlement in open source, but with some projects I do wonder if we'd be better off if they just collapsed, and the sponsorships and volunteers moved to a different project. Not homebrew, I don't use homebrew but from what I hear it's all around decent, but there are a few open source projects that have become de-facto standards that I do wish just go phased out. When X11 stopped being maintained in favour of wayland that forced a bunch of your fellow open source developers to make a bunch of changes to their code, foisted a maintenance burden on them. That's fine, things do change, but try to make it easy on them ( https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217#note_355246 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217#note_3552... for example). In a sense, isn't any kind of expectation you could have for open-source software entitlement? If your FOSS doesn't come loaded up with malware, crypto-miners, and a servo motor to punch you in the genitals, should you be thankful since it was free? What if it just comes with the malware? I'd like to see some kind of social contract "maintainer responsibilities" that lists out what users are allowed to expect before they start getting called entitled. There's some basic stuff, like it being free from active malware and viruses. There's some more questionable stuff, like CVEs or some other method to subscribe to security warnings. There's probably some miscellaneous stuff, like being able to get old versions of the software (not having the author go out of their way to remove old versions like what happened with the infamous NPM left-pad story) and all kinds of other stuff I'm not thinking of.