> It's worth people revisiting Rich Hickey's "Open Source is Not About You". Thank you for the reference to Rich Hickey's note. I used to subscribe to his view

> It's worth people revisiting Rich Hickey's "Open Source is Not About You". Thank you for the reference to Rich Hickey's note. I used to subscribe to his view more or less completely, which is essentially that open source creators owe their users nothing and that if you want something fixed it's your responsibility to do it. Over time, however, I have come around to think that Richard Stallman put his finger on the core issue, which is user rights regarding the code: to understand the code, to make changes to it, to make copies, and to propagate changed versions. [0, 1] This is different and more fundamental than the question of the obligations between members of the open-source community, which are much more amorphous than licenses for code. In the original GNU manifesto, Richard Stallman made a prediction that succeeded beyond all expectation. Once GNU is written, everyone will be able to obtain good system software free, just like air. This means much more than just saving everyone the price of a Unix license. It means that much wasteful duplication of system programming effort will be avoided. This effort can go instead into advancing the state of the art. Not all code needs to be open source. But conferring user rights like the four freedoms on the basic building blocks of software system has unleashed enormous human creativity. I want to work on those building blocks and I'm willing to trade that privilege for other things like making more money. In doing do I acknowledge we do owe users rights to use the code as they please. And I want to live in a society where those rights are upheld, at least for certain types of software. [0] https://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html https://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html [1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html