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Everyone agrees the unreasonable entitlement of many OSS users is bad but I don't see much analysis of where this entitlement comes from. Maybe it's the loss av

by boris 2y ago

Everyone agrees the unreasonable entitlement of many OSS users is bad but I don't see much analysis of where this entitlement comes from. Maybe it's the loss aversion: you first gift them the software but then by refusing to maintain it or add the feature that they need, you effectively take it away or, at least, suggest that they will have to pay for this gift after all (by implementing what they want themselves or paying someone to do it). It could be the same dynamic with the "license rug pull", like in the Redis case discussed the other day. The new Redis license seems like it would be a non-issue for most users but because they had a more liberal license before and it was taken from them, they feel irrational sense of loss? (I realize there are also valid reasons why the BSD license was objectively better than the new custom license, like the ease of compliance.) So maybe what Redis should have done is not to pull the existing rug, so to speak, but to leave it be and lay next to it a new, better rug and offer the users sitting on the old rug to move over, if they find the new features of the new rug outweigh the drawbacks of a new license.

jandrewrogers 2y ago
Everything you are talking about is precisely the undue sense of entitlement that drives people away from contributing to open source. They owe you and everyone else nothing. Not their time, not their attention, not anything. The sense of entitlement to other people’s labor is grotesque. You are free to fork the code and make it your problem to do the things you think the original code authors should be doing. That is your only right. Yet curiously many of the complainants don’t do this.
- boris 2y ago
  I think you are missing my point: I am not saying there is no entitlement or that it's not bad (I've been on the receiving end to know it's true). I am merely wondering where it's coming from. Culturally, at least most of us, are conditioned to reciprocate.
  - jandrewrogers 2y ago
    Fair, I don’t mean to misinterpret your point. I am somewhat triggered because so many people do miss the point. I think people (and governments!) take OSS like a “public accommodation”, without the recognition that the concept of public accommodations are legally predicated on the existence of a business with control over usage and cost. OSS is not a public accommodation but everyone treats it as such, much to the detriment of contributors.
akalsey 2y ago
My wife runs an estate sale company, helping families dispose of property. Sometimes the family wants her to give something away. She hates that. It’s way more work for her than selling it for even $1. She says, “There’s no one more entitled than someone you’re giving something to for free.” People responding to an ad for a free item will ask her to deliver it, load it, store it, repair it, and warranty it. My theory is that folks who seek something out because it’s free tend to have more time than money. And that means they don’t value time very much.
- thephyber 2y ago
  I believe Daniel Kahneman did a cognitive science study that pointed out similar concepts related to a day care that used to stay with kids after hours for free, then charged parents a fee for staying late, then removed the fee.[1] The core takeaway is that there is a stark difference in how people treat a social obligation versus a pay-transaction, and even attempting to switch back to the prior relationship doesn’t necessarily work. My experience is that friends and family frequently give things / items / services to the ones they love and feel social obligations / responsibilities to. I think Open Source Abusive Freeloaders think they are in this category with Open Source Maintainers, but Open Source is a strange hybrid of social obligation to people we have no friend/family/community relationship with, so some people are completely missing the expected behavior standards. Also interesting, I saw a high profile tech journalist Dave Winder) have a mini meltdown venting about a very similar abuse of his time by strangers on LinkedIn recently. [1] https://econlife.com/2018/09/unintended-consequences-from-fines/ https://econlife.com/2018/09/unintended-consequences-from-fi...
  - sph 2y ago
    Sorry but the linked article shows the exact opposite phenomenon: when parents had to pay a late-arrival fee, the number of late parents noticeably increased. In open source the free-loaders are the entitled ones, expecting maintainers to move mountains to accomodate them. In fact, I am led to believe that they superficially look the same, but are very different phenomenons with very different results. I feel that the open source maintainer burnout is not driven by price, but by sheer scale of reaching so many "customers" worldwide of any type, which includes nasty people. If 1% of people are narcissists, and your modest library on GitHub is used by 100,000 people, you'll have to deal with 1,000 potential entitled idiots, which is very stressful for a non-paid volunteer job. I bet that if your library was sold for a nominal price, as your link shows, you'd get even more entitled users. The fact is that not many paid products reach as many users as any average open source project. Most of the world is much poorer than the Western countries, and their only choice often is open source.
eviks 2y ago
> not to pull the existing rug, so to speak, but to leave it be How is this different from just using the old version before the "rug pull"?
- boris 2y ago
  They could still maintain it by, say, backporting bug fixes. And also accept contributions from people who prefer to stay on the old rug. It is extra effort for them and it is risky (everyone might end up staying on and contributing to the old rug turning it into the new new rug), but that's the price they would be paying for the goodwill.
  - eviks 2y ago
    Ok, so that's not "leave it be", that's improving both rugs
  - sabbaticaldev 2y ago
    > but that's the price they would be paying for the goodwill. this post exists because of the price of being an open source developer, your solution is to demand more free work?
    - boris 2y ago
      I am not demanding anything, I am merely exploring if the "license rug pull" problem has a better solution. Redis paid dearly for it (justifiably or not) so if we can find a less costly option, wouldn't it be a good thing? I guess to put it another way, you are trying to change people's attitude towards open source while I am trying to see if there is a way around it.
      - sabbaticaldev 2y ago
        think about a solution that you (and other OSS users) have more work to do then not the maintainers
pkaye 2y ago
Each of the previous versions the Redis released was an existing rug.
throwaway2037 2y ago
> So maybe what Redis should have done is not to pull the existing rug, so to speak, but to leave it be and lay next to it a new, better rug and offer the users sitting on the old rug to move over, if they find the new features of the new rug outweigh the drawbacks of a new license. Can you provide more specifics about your idea? It sounds like Redis would need to maintain two version. Can your ideas be implemented with the same cost structure? I doubt it.
- devsda 2y ago
  I'm referring to my own comment, but I think they are suggesting something close to this[1]. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=devsda#42385023 https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=devsda#42385023
  - boris 2y ago
    Yes, pretty much. I think it would also be good (but admittedly risky) to accept third-party contributions (even new features) to the old version. In other words, instead of trying to force people to use a new license they could have tried to entice them.
rob74 2y ago
> I don't see much analysis of where this entitlement comes from Might I propose one possible reason? Take, for example, the Node.js ecosystem. Someone, a while back, built some library, added it to npm, then people used that module in their projects (maybe as a dependency of another module), along with thousands of other modules, and built an application on top of it. So they don't even really know that they are using the project, have no idea about who contributed to it, never saw its page on GitHub etc. Then, maybe years later, when the project is abandoned and flagged as risky by various codebase scanning tools, some poor developer (who maybe wasn't even involved in the initial decision of using Node for the project) will have to find an alternative for the module (and possibly others that depend on it and are also unmaintained). So maybe in this case it's frustration rather than entitlement?
NGRhodes 2y ago
Some people treat all open source projects as products that they use, when many are labours of love and charity, sometimes pet projects that have become useful to [many] others. They expect product support at a business level like all the other software they use. They see the project's website as a place to get support for their product, not a place to contribute.

by boris 2y ago

jandrewrogers 2y ago

Everything you are talking about is precisely the undue sense of entitlement that drives people away from contributing to open source. They owe you and everyone else nothing. Not their time, not their attention, not anything. The sense of entitlement to other people’s labor is grotesque. You are free to fork the code and make it your problem to do the things you think the original code authors should be doing. That is your only right. Yet curiously many of the complainants don’t do this.

boris 2y ago
I think you are missing my point: I am not saying there is no entitlement or that it's not bad (I've been on the receiving end to know it's true). I am merely wondering where it's coming from. Culturally, at least most of us, are conditioned to reciprocate.
- jandrewrogers 2y ago
  Fair, I don’t mean to misinterpret your point. I am somewhat triggered because so many people do miss the point. I think people (and governments!) take OSS like a “public accommodation”, without the recognition that the concept of public accommodations are legally predicated on the existence of a business with control over usage and cost. OSS is not a public accommodation but everyone treats it as such, much to the detriment of contributors.

akalsey 2y ago

My wife runs an estate sale company, helping families dispose of property. Sometimes the family wants her to give something away. She hates that. It’s way more work for her than selling it for even $1. She says, “There’s no one more entitled than someone you’re giving something to for free.” People responding to an ad for a free item will ask her to deliver it, load it, store it, repair it, and warranty it. My theory is that folks who seek something out because it’s free tend to have more time than money. And that means they don’t value time very much.

thephyber 2y ago
I believe Daniel Kahneman did a cognitive science study that pointed out similar concepts related to a day care that used to stay with kids after hours for free, then charged parents a fee for staying late, then removed the fee.[1] The core takeaway is that there is a stark difference in how people treat a social obligation versus a pay-transaction, and even attempting to switch back to the prior relationship doesn’t necessarily work. My experience is that friends and family frequently give things / items / services to the ones they love and feel social obligations / responsibilities to. I think Open Source Abusive Freeloaders think they are in this category with Open Source Maintainers, but Open Source is a strange hybrid of social obligation to people we have no friend/family/community relationship with, so some people are completely missing the expected behavior standards. Also interesting, I saw a high profile tech journalist Dave Winder) have a mini meltdown venting about a very similar abuse of his time by strangers on LinkedIn recently. [1] https://econlife.com/2018/09/unintended-consequences-from-fines/ https://econlife.com/2018/09/unintended-consequences-from-fi...
- sph 2y ago
  Sorry but the linked article shows the exact opposite phenomenon: when parents had to pay a late-arrival fee, the number of late parents noticeably increased. In open source the free-loaders are the entitled ones, expecting maintainers to move mountains to accomodate them. In fact, I am led to believe that they superficially look the same, but are very different phenomenons with very different results. I feel that the open source maintainer burnout is not driven by price, but by sheer scale of reaching so many "customers" worldwide of any type, which includes nasty people. If 1% of people are narcissists, and your modest library on GitHub is used by 100,000 people, you'll have to deal with 1,000 potential entitled idiots, which is very stressful for a non-paid volunteer job. I bet that if your library was sold for a nominal price, as your link shows, you'd get even more entitled users. The fact is that not many paid products reach as many users as any average open source project. Most of the world is much poorer than the Western countries, and their only choice often is open source.

eviks 2y ago

> not to pull the existing rug, so to speak, but to leave it be How is this different from just using the old version before the "rug pull"?

boris 2y ago
They could still maintain it by, say, backporting bug fixes. And also accept contributions from people who prefer to stay on the old rug. It is extra effort for them and it is risky (everyone might end up staying on and contributing to the old rug turning it into the new new rug), but that's the price they would be paying for the goodwill.
- eviks 2y ago
  Ok, so that's not "leave it be", that's improving both rugs
- sabbaticaldev 2y ago
  > but that's the price they would be paying for the goodwill. this post exists because of the price of being an open source developer, your solution is to demand more free work?
  - boris 2y ago
    I am not demanding anything, I am merely exploring if the "license rug pull" problem has a better solution. Redis paid dearly for it (justifiably or not) so if we can find a less costly option, wouldn't it be a good thing? I guess to put it another way, you are trying to change people's attitude towards open source while I am trying to see if there is a way around it.
    - sabbaticaldev 2y ago
      think about a solution that you (and other OSS users) have more work to do then not the maintainers

pkaye 2y ago

Each of the previous versions the Redis released was an existing rug.

throwaway2037 2y ago

> So maybe what Redis should have done is not to pull the existing rug, so to speak, but to leave it be and lay next to it a new, better rug and offer the users sitting on the old rug to move over, if they find the new features of the new rug outweigh the drawbacks of a new license. Can you provide more specifics about your idea? It sounds like Redis would need to maintain two version. Can your ideas be implemented with the same cost structure? I doubt it.

devsda 2y ago
I'm referring to my own comment, but I think they are suggesting something close to this[1]. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=devsda#42385023 https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=devsda#42385023
- boris 2y ago
  Yes, pretty much. I think it would also be good (but admittedly risky) to accept third-party contributions (even new features) to the old version. In other words, instead of trying to force people to use a new license they could have tried to entice them.

rob74 2y ago

> I don't see much analysis of where this entitlement comes from Might I propose one possible reason? Take, for example, the Node.js ecosystem. Someone, a while back, built some library, added it to npm, then people used that module in their projects (maybe as a dependency of another module), along with thousands of other modules, and built an application on top of it. So they don't even really know that they are using the project, have no idea about who contributed to it, never saw its page on GitHub etc. Then, maybe years later, when the project is abandoned and flagged as risky by various codebase scanning tools, some poor developer (who maybe wasn't even involved in the initial decision of using Node for the project) will have to find an alternative for the module (and possibly others that depend on it and are also unmaintained). So maybe in this case it's frustration rather than entitlement?

NGRhodes 2y ago

Some people treat all open source projects as products that they use, when many are labours of love and charity, sometimes pet projects that have become useful to [many] others. They expect product support at a business level like all the other software they use. They see the project's website as a place to get support for their product, not a place to contribute.