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> These are not unreasonable expectations Forcing someone to do work they don’t want to do just because they are a maintainer is extremely unreasonable. > and

> These are not unreasonable expectations Forcing someone to do work they don’t want to do just because they are a maintainer is extremely unreasonable. > and require minimal effort from the maintainer. I don’t think you understand the time and effort that finding a new maintainer takes. It is far from “minimal” and this mindset that it is somehow expected and/or required to leave a project is exactly my point. > I agree that expecting, or worse―demanding―, a specific behavior from a maintainer is out of place. > In the context of Neofetch, a popular OSS project, the right thing would've been to not ghost the community, announce your eventual departure, and start the discussion of finding a new maintainer. You literally just placed expectations and demands onto someone. Neofetch being a popular or well used project does not somehow make this ok. If someone doesn’t want to continue giving their time contributing or maintaining a project, then that is entirely their decision to make in whatever method they deem right. It’s not your or anyone else’s place to tell another person how they should leave a project they no longer want to be a part of. Nothing in being a user of said project gives you that right or privilege and making it sound like “the right thing to do” is just putting lipstick on an obvious demand. > and that's fine The rest of your comment makes it pretty clear that you do not actually think it is fine.

imiric 2y ago
> I don’t think you understand the time and effort that finding a new maintainer takes. It is far from “minimal” and this mindset that it is somehow expected and/or required to leave a project is exactly my point. If a community of users exists, it takes no effort to communicate your desire to depart the project. If there are active contributors besides the lead maintainer (Neofetch had 206, most of them, granted, with minor contributions), starting a discussion to consider one or several people who could take over takes _minimal_ effort. Many projects do this all the time. It also takes minimal effort to mention the project in one of several maintainers-wanted lists/sites. The difficult thing, as pointed out by a comment in an adjacent thread, is to handover the trust in the project that existing users had to someone you presumably don't trust. As the xz situation showed, this can easily be exploited. Ultimately, if no suitable replacement can be found, then sure, shut the project down. My point is that it's not unreasonable to expect some effort before making this decision. > You literally just placed expectations and demands onto someone. I'm sleepy and sedated, so might not be fully congruent. :S I probably should've prefaced that first line with "unreasonable expectations". But to save us both some time, all I'm saying is that project maintenance involves more than just releasing code as open source. It's fine for a user, paying or not, to have some basic expectations of how the project is maintained, beyond the freedoms they have from the software license. I consider communication as one of those basic expectations, and in my opinion, the author of Neofetch failed to meet them. I am allowed to judge them for it, and you are allowed to disagree.

imiric 2y ago

> I don’t think you understand the time and effort that finding a new maintainer takes. It is far from “minimal” and this mindset that it is somehow expected and/or required to leave a project is exactly my point. If a community of users exists, it takes no effort to communicate your desire to depart the project. If there are active contributors besides the lead maintainer (Neofetch had 206, most of them, granted, with minor contributions), starting a discussion to consider one or several people who could take over takes _minimal_ effort. Many projects do this all the time. It also takes minimal effort to mention the project in one of several maintainers-wanted lists/sites. The difficult thing, as pointed out by a comment in an adjacent thread, is to handover the trust in the project that existing users had to someone you presumably don't trust. As the xz situation showed, this can easily be exploited. Ultimately, if no suitable replacement can be found, then sure, shut the project down. My point is that it's not unreasonable to expect some effort before making this decision. > You literally just placed expectations and demands onto someone. I'm sleepy and sedated, so might not be fully congruent. :S I probably should've prefaced that first line with "unreasonable expectations". But to save us both some time, all I'm saying is that project maintenance involves more than just releasing code as open source. It's fine for a user, paying or not, to have some basic expectations of how the project is maintained, beyond the freedoms they have from the software license. I consider communication as one of those basic expectations, and in my opinion, the author of Neofetch failed to meet them. I am allowed to judge them for it, and you are allowed to disagree.