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How about asking them to behave respectably. A maintainer takes up explicit and implicit responsibilities to their users. If they are unwilling or unable to dis
by Joeri 4y ago
How about asking them to behave respectably. A maintainer takes up explicit and implicit responsibilities to their users. If they are unwilling or unable to discharge those responsibilities in a respectable (“professional”) manner they should let someone else take up that mantle who is willing and able. Money changing hands is not material to this question, as not all responsibilities need to involve the exchange of money.
Just like we expect our neighbors to be respectful to us even when we don’t pay them for the privilege, there’s nothing surprising that users ask a maintainer to be respectful of their time. Yes, the users can go somewhere else, just like how we can move if we have a bad neighbor, but that’s just not a good way of going about things.
- LtWorf 4y ago> A maintainer takes up explicit and implicit responsibilities to their users. No, that's not how it works. I'm free to publish something and completely ignore bugreports. There is no such responsibility principle. Some people, out of goodness of their hearths, follow up on things. But they have no obligation to do so.
- praptak 4y agoThis is not about obligation to fix bug reports. It is about respectful communication, which is pretty orthogonal.
- fellellor 4y agoI can just ghost you. The only obligatory relationship possible between us is either of blood or money. As a private individual, I don’t really owe you anything. You have the previlege of not having to use my work, or fork it and make it your own.
- epse 4y agoYou can and that's fine, but if you do reply and you're unnecessarily rude, I hope we can agree that's bad
- LtWorf 4y ago> I hope we can agree that's bad No we can't agree on that. There is no obligation to be polite.
- biorach 4y agoRudeness is highly corrosive in a collaborative environment, RMS is damaging the community needed to sustain development by his rudeness.
- LtWorf 4y agoThere is no obligation to collaborate either. I can write a software, publish it and insult people who wrongly report bugs. Of course I wouldn't expect people to love me for that, and it's not how I personally act; but if someone felt like acting in this way, it would be fully within his/her rights to do so.
- biorach 4y agoRMS has the right to behave as he wants. He is not obliged to behave in a particular way. My point is that the way he chooses to behave is in the long run damaging to the community that he founded and leads.
- praptak 4y agoThe only truly obligatory relationship is between you and the physical world. It's dictated by the laws of physics.
- jcelerier 4y agoThe places where I have seen the least respect between humans in my life are all in professional contexts. Why would you equate the two ? They're almost opposite.
- patrick451 4y agoWhat? If I write code and stick it on github or whatever, be glad I let you clone it. But I don't owe you a damned thing. If my users don't like how I maintain the repo, they can fork it and maintain it themselves. Or find a different project. This entitled attitude that maintainers owe their users anything is visibly driving people away from that work.