8 ms·

Open source is not about you (2018)

226 points by doubleg 8mo ago

mtmail 8mo ago
Can you add the year (2018) to the submission title? https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22Open%20Source%20Is%20Not%20About%20You%22&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
regenschutz 8mo ago
It would be nice to have some context on this. I assume there was some drama regarding this "Cognitect" organisation named. As someone not involved with Clojure at, it's difficult to understand the context for why this post was created.
- tom_ 8mo ago
  Presumably this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990729 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990729
  - squigz 8mo ago
    TFA was posted in 2018; that drama is from the past few days. What connection is there?
    - pixl97 8mo ago
      You're not able to connect these two subjects? A thesis on "don't abuse people in open source" and a bot "abusing people in open source"?
    - tom_ 8mo ago
      But the link to the post was posted here just now! - which I'm assuming means something. Both share a theme: the trials and tribulations of running an open source project, I suppose. Some contributions, one way or another, demand more of them than the maintainer might like. How do you deal with this? How do you set the boundaries? And so on.
      - squigz 8mo ago
        I guess we were responding to different things: my reading of GP's question was why the gist was posted (back in 2018), not why it was shared today. But indeed yes, I can see that connection.
        tom_ 8mo ago
        I think you're right anyway. Re-reading the post with your comment in mind, I think it's clear enough that this was what was actually meant.
  - bee_rider 8mo ago
    There was also a thread about MinIO not being maintained anymore. Hard to say without commentary. Maybe the poster here was influenced by multiple threads (I guess that seems likely, if it was just one thread they influenced them, they could have linked it in that thread).
- brazzy 8mo ago
  It was a reaction to the State of Clojure Survey 2018 (https://danielcompton.net/clojure-survey-2018 https://danielcompton.net/clojure-survey-2018) and discussions it sparked, in which there were depands for Clojure to change to a more community-driven development process.
- doubleg 8mo ago
  This was the context back then: https://old.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/a0pjq9/rich_hickey_open_source_is_not_about_you/ealatsq/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/a0pjq9/rich_hickey... I was reminded of this gist when reading the discussion about MinIO (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47000041 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47000041).
rtgfhyuj 8mo ago
[flagged]
- jmuguy 8mo ago
  What do you mean?
haberman 8mo ago
Lately I'm seeing more and more value in writing down expectations explicitly, especially when people's implicit assumptions about those expectations diverge. The linked gist seems to mostly be describing a misalignment between the expectations of the project owners and its users. I don't know the context, but it seems to have been written in frustration. It does articulate a set of expectations, but it is written in a defensive and exasperated tone. If I found myself in a situation like that today, I would write a CONTRIBUTING.md file in the project root that describes my expectations (eg. PRs are / are not welcome, decisions about the project are made in X fashion, etc.) in a dispassionate way. If users expressed expectations that were misaligned with my intentions, I would simply point them to CONTRIBUTING.md and close off the discussion. I would try to take this step long before I had the level of frustration that is expressed in the gist. I don't say this to criticize the linked post; I've only recently come to this understanding. But it seems like a healthier approach than to let frustration and resentment grow over time.
- travisjungroth 8mo ago
  > I don't say this to criticize the linked post What you have written is obviously a criticism of the linked post.
  - haberman 8mo ago
    If I'm criticizing the linked post, then I'm also criticizing myself, because I could easily imagine having written it.
    - nyeah 8mo ago
      I think some might get the impression that you're complaining about Hickey's tone. Perhaps your emotional terms "frustration," "defensive," and "exasperated" may be the reason.
      - haberman 8mo ago
        I don't see anything wrong with the way he expressed himself, and I think his point is totally legitimate. I mostly just felt bad that he experienced so much grief about it, on account of a gift he was offering to the world.
_slih 8mo ago
[dead]
- belval 8mo ago
  It's an interesting world for sure, I maintain a somewhat popular package and got a form to fill from a Deloitte consultant about security once. They seemed genuinely confused when I told them I was not going to fill compliance form and make patching commitments for free. Really makes you wonder how many maintainers are letting themselves be taken advantage of.
  - joshlemer 8mo ago
    Maybe that would be a good opportunity to offer them a quote for how much you could do the work for.
    - embedding-shape 8mo ago
      Yeah, that's what I do. Anytime anyone from a company sends an email about whatever, who wants me to help them (for their company) in private with something, I ask if they're willing to pay for my time spent on it, maybe 20% says yes. Most of the time they end up getting redirected to use the same venues the rest of the community has access to too.
    - SoftTalker 8mo ago
      Assuming you want to. But if you do, understand that accepting payment for services creates obligation to deliver, and possibly liability for poor performance. You may or may not want that.
  - warkdarrior 8mo ago
    Missed opportunity here. You could have offered consulting services, $10,000/hour. Compliance form requires at 40 hours of work minimum.
    - yunnpp 8mo ago
1313ed01 8mo ago
I think community development with repos out in the open and all that is increasingly a too high cost. I will migrate my little open source projects from GitHub as soon as I can decide on what site to post source code releases (tar.gz). Happy to share my code, but no need for everything to be out in the open.
- intrasight 8mo ago
  I fail to see the difference between public on github or public elsewhere.
  - blibble 8mo ago
    codeberg is run as a foundation with the explicit aim to help open source projects prosper github is run by microsoft to sell tools to your CEO with the ultimate aim of making you redundant
  - 1313ed01 8mo ago
    No public version control. No issues or pull requests or other social features. Like every project, more or less, before GitHub or Sourceforge.
    - pjmlp 8mo ago
      Well we had RCS, CVS and Usenet groups. And before that, compressed archives on BBS, or type in listings with snail mail.
  - LegionMammal978 8mo ago
    IME, on GitHub (or the other major public repo services), it's far more likely than not that I can pull up an old version of a project from 10 years ago if I want to experiment with it. (In case other old things used it as a dependency, I really want to reproduce an old result, etc.) On the vast majority of other distribution platforms, it's at best a 50/50 as to whether (a) the platform still exists with any of its contents, and (b) the authors haven't wiped all the old versions to clear up space or whatever. The former typically fails on academic personal websites (which generally get dumped within 5-15 years), and the latter typically fails on SourceForge-style sites. That is to say, I am not a big fan of the popular alternatives to Git repos as a distribution method.
OrvalWintermute 8mo ago
I feel much better after reading this because our organizations are: - funding OSS developers - engaging with OSS developers to determine potential funding priorities - providing project hardware at the project level - providing hardware to the individual OSS developer While we are not to the point of hosting events in Hawaii yet, I’m hoping we can see this as a teaming arrangement to accomplish great things together!
ge96 8mo ago
Tangent It's funny how a hobby project becomes "a burden" when you have to consider making it friendly/easy to consume by everyone eg. writing docs from the basics like how to make a venv in python, get your env setup...
- abadar 8mo ago
  I get that. I am a non-programmer who vibe codes personal web apps for Magic: The Gathering and Pokémon TCG. I turn them into github pages for easy access for myself. I don't share them with my hobby communities because I don't want to hear feedback because I don't want these finished projects to become eternal projects.
  - ge96 8mo ago
    Curious what does your app do/web app? And how good is the vibe coding part, do you generally get what you're trying to achieve in first few runs? That's cool you're able to make what you want with that tech.
    - abadar 8mo ago
      My latest apps are * Cardsphere (Magic card trading website) wishlist to inventory comparer * Scryfall (Magic card database) search result CSV Downloader * Cube Tagger, an app to easily tag cards with function tags for easy categorizing in cubes (boardgamified collection of Magic cards) The vibe coding part is wonderful because I can "make" the software I want. However, it always takes hours of runs to get to where I need it to be because I'm unpracticed at project planning. I constantly hit critical edge cases and UX problems.
- tdrz 8mo ago
  One of the issues is that even if you do write documentation, some people that say they want to contribute will not search for it and directly proceed to ask the overworked maintainer to point them to the exact page of the documentation of their interest.
- hinkley 8mo ago
patcon 8mo ago
I dislike this essay so much I can't say whether it accomplished its original intent, but my experience is that it's held up in really disappointing situations which sit counter to my collectivist values I have a ton of experience with community-building, and what's espoused in this essay is an attack on the values of that world imho. My take-home is that there are many conceptions of what "open source" is about, and from where its value flows
- jamespo 8mo ago
  I think "Open source is a licensing and delivery mechanism, period." is a statement that bears repeating.
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
- ThrowawayTestr 8mo ago
  It comes down to beggars asking skilled people for free labor. If the "community" really wants something, they can send a pull request.
  - lucketone 8mo ago
    Or.. fork it
- sethops1 8mo ago
  If you want to create and maintain a community that's fine, maybe even great. TFA is just pointing out that the presence of an OSS license is not an implicit signal that the project is interested in any such community. They're separate things, and my read is that the author is frustrated with the constant conflating of the two. It's not an attack on your values at all.
  - throwaway346434 8mo ago
    Quick questions; as this project clearly exists in a community-less vacuum: How do people keep finding and using it? How do complaints or feature requests keep arriving? Why is the published to an audience that doesn't exist? Or is it fair to say the project has published in public, so has contact with a very broad community already?
01HNNWZ0MV43FF 8mo ago
> Sign in to GitHub to continue to Gist That's new Edit: https://web.archive.org/web/20260213161600/https://gist.github.com/richhickey/1563cddea1002958f96e7ba9519972d9 https://web.archive.org/web/20260213161600/https://gist.gith...
hirako2000 8mo ago
Ultimately it is about you. That you are entitled to have say too. That such & such says should be followed, nope. But one could say it's even less about you with close source.
patcon 8mo ago
I'll just leave this here: https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/stars/2024/1 https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/stars/2024/1 Just look at clojure's stats and understand what this "wisdom" brings
- ozkatz 8mo ago
  correlation does not imply causation
  - joshlemer 8mo ago
    But it is evidence for causation.
    - lucketone 8mo ago
      Is it?
      - joshlemer 8mo ago
        Yes. If A is correlated with B, is A more likely to cause B than if A is not correlated with B? Clearly yes.
dakiol 8mo ago
> As a user of something open source you are not thereby entitled to anything at all I understand what the author means, but I think that in any human-2-human interaction, we are all entitled to at least basic courtesy. For example, if you show courtesy by contributing to an open source project and following all the guidelines they have, I think it's fair to assume that courtesy will be shown in return. I know that may be difficult to achieve (e.g., a high volume of noise preventing project authors from giving courtesy to those who deserve it), but that doesn'tt mean we are entitled to nothing. And this has nothing to do with open source or software; it's just common sense when dealing with people. But yeah, if you contribute something of very poor quality (you didn't give it the attention it needed, it's full of bugs, or shows no attention to detail; or these days, it's packed with AI-generated content that makes it 10x harder to digest, even if the intention is good), then perhaps you are not entitled to anything
- shermantanktop 8mo ago
  You as a first-time contributor need to know that the large group of first-time contributors has a lot of poorly behaved people in it, and that the burden is on you to establish that you are not one of them. Trust is built through iterative exchange. This is Bayesian priors - default is average, and only moves on the introduction of new information. Lots of examples of this. In 1950's westerns, if a stranger comes to a small town, the default treatment is a guarded form of hospitality with a health measure of suspicion. If you are dating someone new, you are by default understood as the average first date partner, and the average first date partner is not a great match.
  - awesome_dude 8mo ago
    I'm not saying you're wrong - but I do detest that attitude myself As you say, trust is a two way street, and first time contributors are being expected to trust that it's not personal when they are met with brusquerie. I know it's hard when it's the 99th person and you've had to deal with 98 less than nice individuals, but defaulting to an abrupt or blunt manner does nobody any favours.
0xbadcafebee 8mo ago
Counterpoints: - You are entitled to human decency. Maintainers don't get to be rude just because they run a project. This is a common thing in a lot of projects; maintainers have power, and this allows them to be rude without concern. Not ok. - As a maintainer, if you publish your work as open source, you already acknowledge you are engaging with an entire community, culture, and ethos. We all know how it works: you put a license on your work that (often, but not always) says people need to share their changes. So those people may share their changes back to you, assuming you might want to integrate them. So you know this is going to happen... so you need to be prepared for that. That is a skill to learn. - Since maintainers do owe basic human politeness, and they know people will be interacting with them, maintainers do owe this culture some form of communication of their intentions. If they don't want to take any changes, put that in CONTRIBUTING and turn off GH PRs. If they want to take changes, but no AI changes, put that in CONTRIBUTING. If they don't want to do support, turn off GH Issues. If they require a specific 10-point series of steps before they look at a PR or Issue, put that in CONTRIBUTING. It's on the user to read this document and follow it - but it's on you to create it, so they know how to interface with you. Be polite, and tell people what you will and won't accept in CONTRIBUTING (and/or SUPPORT). Even if it's just "No contributing", "No support". (My personal issue: I spend hours working on preparing an Issue or PR to fix someone's project, and they ignore or close it without a word. Now I don't want to contribute to anything. This is bad for the open source community.)
- shermantanktop 8mo ago
  Maintainers are sometimes not perfect. But they are providing known value, and you are trying to add something with unknown value. That's an asymmetry which doesn't look like a mutual exchange. So I'd downgrade most of the hard obligations you describe to "it's really smart to do this." I agree with the behavioral observations. People shouldn't be assholes just because they can. That applies to everyone everywhere. Reminding someone with a bit of power to not be a petty tyrant is fine with me.
  - hinkley 8mo ago
    I find code I wrote that violates advice I've given other people all the time. I've made release cycle mistakes on projects I maintain that I would have bet money a few years ago that you'd never catch me making. The siren song of One More Commit or One More PR is out there, and there's always going to be some fraction of your work you do that in retrospect you should have slept on, maybe twice. (I recently fixed a problem I've been staring at for a year in an afternoon after a new, stupidly simple solution presented itself on a walk) But there are lines, and you have to be careful not to go across them either too far or too often. Or you have to be utterly indispensable like Linus, and have a thick skin to criticism... like Linus. And if you have a thick skin to criticism you don't write long screeds about how everyone else is wrong and you're right. You just move on.
spaceport 8mo ago
Sometimes you just gotta get the frustration out in a gist
another_twist 8mo ago
I think the issue is answering the question whats the business model ? If the team makes money consulting on clojure, then thats likely a bad model since I have not seen a single example of people paying for advice on coding. Usually the answer is to hire a coder who knows thier stuff and increasingly to use AI. Open source for infrastructure products work just fine. It simplifies distribution by eliminating the need for procurement, builds some kind of attachment since people love using their own tinkered products and hedges risk for the customer since if the devs stop working on the product someone else will pick up. But having to fill out forms, doing compliance work are great money making levers for which you just charge through the nose. Ultimately, open soircing is a distribution strategy and whether you should adopt it or not is dependent on the context. Most infra products do and it works out fine. Case in point: Clickhouse, Kafka, Grafana, Sentry, RedHat, Gitlab.
inoffensivename 8mo ago
I love this article. Nobody owes you a new release, or a signed binary, or a feature you care about.
- hinkley 8mo ago
  There's a project where almost all the merged PRs since the last release are mine and I'm practically vibrating with trying not making a big deal out of it. It's not unlike how the game I gave someone as a birthday present on Steam has only been played for 2 hours and I'm absolutely certain it'd be his favorite game if he just got out of the character creator and played the goddamned thing. <cleansing breath> It's fine. Everything is fine.
rlnorthcutt 8mo ago
Its an interesting situation when an asset (like an open source project) is run by a team of volunteers (community)... but due to licensing, it kind of belongs to the whole world (community) As a user of a project, I DO have a voice... but unless I am actively contributing (money, time, resources), then my voice has a different weight. On the one hand, I don't like the idea that anyone should get more influence simply because they pay money... or that anyone should have more power just because they are active in the project. Both of those situations are possible paths for corruption or abuse of power. On the other hand, the tragedy of the commons is a real thing. People who take, never give back, and then have the audacity to not only ask but demand things... well, that makes me angry. I've moved from being an idealist to a realist, when it comes to open source. I think the evolving models we are seeing that restrict commercial competition are sometimes pretty good (overall), and the rise in COSS is a positive sign. We need to ensure that good projects have a way to sustain themselves. The best projects have people (or even teams) who are focused on bringing new people in and helping them contribute. Not everyone can do that, but I think finding ways to enable people to contribute (money, time, etc) is an important part of building the community.
- blenderob 8mo ago
  (edit: I totally misunderstood the parent comment and wrote this reply. I've apologized for it in comment below. I could delete this comment but I am leaving it here so that others don't get confused when they see the replies below it.) > or that anyone should have more power just because they are active in the project. So you are saying that although I create a project to solve my problems but as soon as I make it open source (so that others can also benefit) my power on the project will become equal to the power every random person on earth has on my project? If making my project reduces my power on the project, why would I ever open source anything? Good thing that open source world does not work like that. When I make my project open source, I still have full power on my project and I decide what goes in it and what is rejected. I have no reason to not use the powers I have on the project. If it ever became like you say that as the creator of an open source project, my powers will be equal to the powers of every random user, I'd stop making anything open source.
raincole 8mo ago
> As a user of something open source you are not thereby entitled to anything at all As a user of Hackernews you're not thereby entitled to anything at all. As a member of the thing(forums, discord channels, facebook groups, any online community and real life community) you're not necessarily thereby entitled to anything at all. Even as a user of some proprietary software, you're still not entitled to anything except perhaps critical bugfixes and security updates. Software is sold on shrinkwrap basis. You got what you bought. It doesn't mean expressing your opinions about Hackernews, the thing or some proprietary software, even negative ones, is inherently wrong.
- ectospheno 8mo ago
  > It doesn't mean expressing your opinions about Hackernews, the thing or some proprietary software, even negative ones, is inherently wrong. I agree. I’ve often wondered why open source maintainers get worked up over this. You can just ignore them. Odds are the maintainer spent zero seconds thinking about the person before the negativity over the course of their entire lives to that point. Why let them have free rent in your head now? Chuckle and go on not thinking about them for the remainder of your life.
  - ragall 8mo ago
    There's a very good reason: we need the users to be aware of this, and exert self-restraint in communications with the developer team otherwise public fora become untenable and the core team, to avoid being pestered, will be forced to switch to closed, invite-only, comms channels (private mailing lists, private Discord servers, etc...). It's very valuable to be able to keep publicly accessible channels.
moritzwarhier 8mo ago
But it is about humans in general! Humans who want to use the software, and humans who author (or control dependencies of) the software. Commenting as if this was a comment on yesterday's clawdbot-thread; I know it isn't, and it has previously been submitted here and is a good text. It's about entitlement and using free OSS vs paying for a software product, I know. But I think the gist of this gist can be generalized from "why you should not feel entitled to anything as a FOSS user" to "why software is about humans". Especially because the commercial aspect is not as direct as in paid closed-source software for FOSS, but pressure (including commercial and/or social pressure) still exists. Edit: "still" is not even a fitting word here, because the reliance of commercial software on FOSS is the societal change that causes this change in issue reporting, I'd say. Crowd dynamics / psychological aspects cannot be ignored anywhere.
29athrowaway 8mo ago
Open source has many altruistic and smart people that like to learn and build while benefiting others. But then you also have high ego people motivated by building a personal brand, prestige and status... and open source is just means to that end. While their contributions are valuable, conflicts of interest arise.
didgetmaster 8mo ago
For those who maintain FOSS projects: How often when a user requests/demands your attention to support/fix/enhance the project to suit their particular needs, do they actually pay you something once you explain that what they are asking for, comes with a price?
renewiltord 8mo ago
It balances with ability to fork. So if you’re not happy, then fork.
casey2 8mo ago
You are not entitled to that food or land over there, neither am I. What are we gonna do about it? You're naive if you think your immune to social exploitation just cause you write some words. Your entire being is defined by social exploitation. You adopt our language, our roles etc but you believe you can transcend them when it's convenient. Developers aren't entitled to make people reliant on software and ghost them. I'm sure teachers, firefighters and congress (lol) would all love to stay home and wait out the collapse of society, but they go to work because people rely on them. It's an odd thing for me to build a firetruck, go around pretending to be a firefighter (out compete and make the firefighters lose funding) and then snap back at people expecting me to work for free even though governments do fund open source. If you volunteer as a crossing guard, even if you aren't paid, you have a duty of care. There aren't currently laws against your behavior, but if there is a pattern of such behavior it may be illegal. The EU through the CRA is doing good work in this regard. Of course governments shouldn't compel people to work (>.o). But nobody wants to live in a world of abandoned core infrastructure projects. You aren't an exception, but you thought yourself special when you decided to work for free. Now instead of understanding why people work for money you scrawl against human nature.
- lucketone 8mo ago
  Could you fix this bug? Please. https://hibernate.atlassian.net/jira/software/c/projects/HHH/issues?jql=project%20%3D%20%22HHH%22%20AND%20statusCategory%20IN%20(%22To%20Do%22%2C%20%22In%20Progress%22)%20ORDER%20BY%20updated%20DESC&selectedIssue=HHH-19917 https://hibernate.atlassian.net/jira/software/c/projects/HHH...
Lammy 8mo ago
> Open source is a licensing and delivery mechanism, period. It means you get the source for software and the right to use and modify it. Once again confusing the two and proving that “Open Source” was the worst thing to ever happen to “Free Software”
Joel_Mckay 8mo ago
Some businesses confuse Sales with racketeering with a computer. People don't want to hear your pitch deck every time they use a product, or budget for something critical to their operations every month. FOSS is simply computer users doing what they have always done, and accomplishing things no one (or no company) could ever do on their own. For those that paid tens of thousands of dollars to keep the office talent happy with what they know software wise, it has been my observation the training and support is often still missing on the commercial options as well... once they get paid. Finally, most become locked into a vendors up-sold ecosystem as they choke off compatibility with other external product workflows. And you can't add something to fit your specific use-case, as single users don't matter in business products. FOSS is usually better in almost every way most of the time, but often lacks stability as upstream projects continuously undergo permutation. Note, even the old closed-source Nvidia GPU drivers in kernel <6.0.8 are now abandoned in >6.15 to send a lot of old Linux laptops to the landfill. Confusing skill issues with the realty of the software business is common. =3
M95D 8mo ago
This is the attitude that made me keep my patches to myself. Hey, you, FOSS maintainer, whoever you are: - If you make your project public, it means you want and expect people to use it. You could at least write some documentation, so I don't waste my time and then find out, days later, it isn't capable of what I need or I simply don't know how to use it. - If you set up a bug tracker, then at least have the decency to answer bug reports. Bugs make it unusable. Someone took the time to write those bug reports. I'm not asking to fix them (I lost that hope decades ago), but at least you could give a one line answer or 2-line guidance for some another person that might want to try a fix - "I don't have time to fix it, sorry, but it's probably because of <that thing> in <that file>." I mean, you wrote the stuff! One minute of thinking on your part is the same as 6 hours of digging for someone who never saw the code before. - If you open it up to pull requests, it means you want people to contribute. Have the decency to review them. Someone took time away from their jobs, families or entertainment to write those PRs. Ignoring them because you don't need that feature, not affected by the bug, or simply because of code aesthetics is an insult to the one who wrote it. PS: - And no, don't expect someone else to write the documentation for your code. Same as the bugs: 1 minute of your time is 6 hours of work for someone else. If you can't do at least these things, just say it's abandoned on the front page and be done with it.
- ForceBru 8mo ago
  Yeah, I didn't like that attitude either. > As a user of something open source you are not thereby entitled to anything at all. You are not entitled to contribute. You are not entitled to features. You are not entitled to the attention of others. You are not entitled to having value attached to your complaints. You are not entitled to this explanation. Sure, I'm not entitled to anything. At the same time, this text essentially says "you don't matter", which I personally don't like.
  - bigbadfeline 8mo ago
    Right, it sounds like "you don't matter to me", which I read as "Oops, wrong address, go find somebody else". The bigger problem here is that the OP author is pretending to be a speaker for all open source, I guess there's no other way to justify the uncompromising attitude he somehow developed. AI will undoubtedly change how OSS works, bot-submited PRs can be overwhelming, authors should not despair though, where there's a will, there's a way.
jaredcwhite 8mo ago
I don't know why people keep sharing this. It's highly offensive and inflammatory. Plenty of open source projects consider themselves a community which welcome newcomers, take governance seriously, and ensure that even if suggestions or contributions are rejected, it's done in a thoughtful and considerate way. Acting like a jerk isn't a blueprint for how to be a good maintainer, it's how to be a jerk. And this "us experts vs. entitled users" mentality is cultural poison.
- k33n 8mo ago
  Calling someone a jerk for their views on how OSS should or shouldn’t function isn’t appropriate. It’s actually completely out of line and smacks of the very entitlement described in the piece. Don’t agree with his views? Go make your own project and run it however you want. Cultural poison? The truly cultured understand that a monoculture would be the real poison. There’s room for all modes of operation in OSS. Without “jerks”, there’d be no Linux and there would be nothing else of high value either. If you want to sit around and hold hands then find a project where they do that, or maybe just take up finger painting.
- ragall 8mo ago
  > It's highly offensive and inflammatory. It is sane and factually correct. > Plenty of open source projects consider themselves a community which welcome newcomers, take governance seriously Rich is taking governance very seriously. Others aren't and give nobodies the right to vote. In any case, he's factually correct. Nothing in open source implies anything about any type of governance, as "Open source is a licensing and delivery mechanism, period". > Acting like a jerk Pot, meet kettle.
  - throwaway346434 8mo ago
    You might need to go back and read that one again, this is the faintest criticism of a lengthy screed in which the person you are replying to labels user-hostile behaviours as "acting like a jerk" and generally disapproves. Your counter argument to this is to just be contrarian and imply they are a jerk... because, well, you don't agree with them. You didn't add substance to the discussion (facts, evidence, argument seeking middle ground), you just sought to set fire to someone because you were uncomfortable with the dim prospect you might be wrong/guilty of acting like this/be the subject of the criticism. Do you see how this undermines your point of view/actually re-enforces the validity of the criticism?
hinkley 8mo ago
I don’t disagree with Rich Hickey a lot but this one grinds my gears: > All social impositions associated with it, including the idea of 'community-driven-development' are part of a recently-invented mythology with little basis in how things actually work, Open source is effectively a gift economy. And we actually talked about it being so in the late 90’s early 00’s. Gift economies are older than human civilization. This is not a recently invented thing, nor is it a mythology. They have rules about how much either party can impose upon the other. Yes people on the receiving end of those gifts can be entitled brats. That doesn’t negate all social contract on the other side, until it escalates far beyond propriety. Edit to add: Rich’s sense of authority to say things like this comes not from his prowess in writing code, which is noteworthy, but from his substantial participation in that gift economy that he is negating here. That entitlement he feels to say something is how gift economies work. Those who gave more have the authority to comment on what happens next.
- bigstrat2003 8mo ago
  No, he's completely right on that point. There's this weird misconception in the tech community that "open source" means "you'll accept my contributions if I send them". I've seen people try to argue (in complete seriousness) that SQLite isn't open source because the developers keep contributions private. I don't know where the mistaken conflating of "open source" and "developed by the community" comes from, but it is mistaken, and Rich was quite right to push back on it.
  - hinkley 8mo ago
    I’m not disagreeing that people get entitled about the gifts they think they’re bringing to someone else’s party. Yeah it’s frustrating and sometimes it’s bonkers. Don’t bring “lutefisk” to someone else’s party and expect to be celebrated as a hero. That doesn’t absolve the host of all scrutiny in perpetuity, and that’s usually how these conversations go. This is a popularity contest and trying to have that conversation with, frankly, people who have never one a popularity contest is exhausting. But you still have to point out things to your unrepentant friend even if they don’t seem to listen. It’s not a conflation. Open source is two things. One, a way to trick your boss into letting you keep using tools you developed here at your next job. Two, a gift economy we are all participating in. Gift economies are a community. Whether you want it to be or not, it is. That we listen to Rich Hickey at all is almost entirely down to the latter. He has given many gifts and this entitled to a soapbox precisely because of the gifts. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. Suck it up buttercup. Or, continue to act confused and indignant as people call you and people like you out for the rest of time. It’s not going to stop.
bachmeier 8mo ago
> Open source is a no-strings-attached gift, and all participants should recognize it as such. I've always felt this is incorrect. First, because lots of people use open source to further their careers, it isn't. Open source contributions are paid work if you benefit from them in any way. Second, if you use open source yourself, your work is no longer a gift. You're contributing back to the community you've taken from. The person you're being a jerk to because it's a "gift" might be the author of other software you've used.
- yunnpp 8mo ago
  Why is this down-voted? Everything we do in this industry rests upon somebody else's gift of free/open software, that is the reality of it. I do feel an inclination to contribute back however I can, even if it's just documentation, or submitting a (properly detailed) bug report, for precisely the reason described here.
- ragall 8mo ago
  It is correct. Just because your livelihood might hinge on a specific project doesn't mean that its developers have any obligation to accept your patches. It means you have to be very careful in choosing which project you hitch your wagon. Obligations are created, in order, through law, contracts or personal relationships. If you have neither, you have nothing.
  - bachmeier 8mo ago
    > It is correct. Just because your livelihood might hinge on a specific project doesn't mean that its developers have any obligation to accept your patches. I think you responded to the wrong comment, since I didn't say anything about being obligated to accept patches.
    - ragall 8mo ago
      I responded to "You're contributing back to the community you've taken from" which implies that one has some obligation to accept a patch (calling it a contribution). Just because you're offering doesn't mean that others are obliged to accept or even review it.
nunez 8mo ago
I don't know. On one hand, they're totally right; their project, their rules. On the other hand, it feels crappy to contribute to an open source project that doesn't actually take contributions (or derides new contributors because they made a mistake in their diff or PR due to missing a sentence in their gigantic contributing doc) or use a project that silently changed hands and is now full of tracking, malware and other junk.
waffletower 8mo ago
"You are not entitled to this explanation." After reading this, I immediately heard the song "I Don't Care About You" by Fear (https://open.spotify.com/track/6kuSvl812VLLpFhPegnCfY?si=2a01a316564d4220 https://open.spotify.com/track/6kuSvl812VLLpFhPegnCfY?si=2a0...) in my head.
ertucetin 8mo ago
I just fucking love this guy.
tegiddrone 8mo ago
A tiresome sysadmin I've been talking to is under the impression of: "well, if <open-core-saas> stagnates or otherwise shifts focus away from our interests then someone will just fork it, duh!" .. when glancing thru Discord successors
dang 8mo ago
Related. Others? Open Source Is Not About You (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39905557 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39905557 - April 2024 (1 comment) Open source is not about you (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31957554 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31957554 - July 2022 (205 comments) Open Source Is Not About You (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27003713 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27003713 - May 2021 (5 comments) Open Source is Not About You - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18538123 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18538123 - Nov 2018 (277 comments)
notepad0x90 8mo ago
if you publish something to the public, you are responsible for it to a degree. You can't just say "i'm not responsible" and avoid responsibility. "I put rat poison in candies and put it outside my door for halloween, but it had a sign that says 'The owner is not responsible for any harm or effects resulting from consuming these candies'" , see how silly that sounds? If you advertise your software as intended to do a thing, licenses might protect you legally, but not morally or ethically, from people attempting to use it, and relying on it. Imagine if the maintainers of glibc decided to backdoor it, but since they're not responsible for it, and you're on your own for using it, it's not their fault right? If the maintainers of openssl decided to drop sha256 support, they're not responsible for the chaos that ensues right? FFS! how clueless are devs sometimes. It's insane. This right here is the worst part of open source. Don't use open source! that's the message here. If you're in the EU, and you're seeing all these efforts to rely on open source software to avoid American-made software, read this post! Don't use open source software because the authors of that software could sabotage their work or do anything they want with the software and they feel like they have no obligation to anyone. Does that sound familiar? At least American big-tech gets fined on a regular bases for doing nasty things, at least they have executives you can imprison if needed be. And they're not under any illusion that "i'm not responsible" is a get out of jail free card. Use only properly supported software. I'm a bit salty, because I've relied on and supported Open Source software several times before. Every. Single. Time. Even when i'm creating PRs, they're dicks about it. Even when I create issues. Who cares, they're not even responsible enough to refuse support. Here is what should be done, if most devs really agree with this take: You can write any software you want, but publishing it to the public should only be permitted after you pass tests, like your identity being verified, support process being established,etc... You can't just give away food, vehicles, houses, just about anything you can think of without some requirement of that sort. If devs are going out of their way like this to be irresponsible, then the chaos and damage they cause must be mitigated. When you "Open" anything, it could be a door, software, a canister of nerve-gas; you're responsible for what comes out of it and how it affects others. you're also responsible for what happens when others enter it. The only way around this I can think of is if perhaps in every way a person can download or access your software, publish a clear and unmistakable warning "Do not use this software for any reason at all. Do not read the source code. Do not attempt to build it, or run it." even then, you're not free from all responsibility. It's like malware authors that put disclaimers like "for educational purposes only" on their malware publications. you'll still go to prison, it isn't a defense. I'm not claiminng random people have entitlements to get their PRs approved, or issues resolved. But for developers to go so far as show hostility towards people who use their software, is not far from actually publishing harmful software. A good and reasonable balance might be that software that's used by more than a certain threshold of people should be required to either support their software, or close-source it. You have free-speech, not the right to put the public in harm's way. Honestly, I think this sort of whining is what is driving all these verification laws and restrictions. I think being glad people are using your software so much, and they're requesting support, creating PRs, and so on is the right attitude with open source software. If you get mad about all that, you're hurting the freedoms of open source devs all over by trying to make your software open for the sake of clout or whatever. And really, don't publish a repository to the public if you expect no contribution. Just host tarball on your site. "Open source is not about you", yeah, sure, it isn't about irresponsible devs getting free advertisement and farming clout either.
palata 8mo ago
If someone gives ice cream for free in the street, we don't say "you should have the decency to provide chairs and tables so that we can enjoy our ice cream", do we? Open source users have to understand that when they benefit from an open source project, it's like receiving a gift in the street. You don't get to ask for more: either you accept the gift, or you don't. If you go an complain because they should have a vegan option or different flavours, you are the problem.
elihu 8mo ago
The other side of this is that if you want your open source project to be useful to people, relevant, included by default in Linux distributions, highly regarded by the community, and so on then it's expected that you treat your users well. Not every project aspires to such things, but if you do then the path to success requires at a minimum not treating users as a burden. Some users might be particularly rude or entitled, in which case you can politely decline their feature requests and move on. Basically, it's never rude for a user to file a bug report or request a feature. It's never rude for the maintainer to decline to implement a feature if they haven't budgeted time (or other relevant resources) to do it, it doesn't align with the fundamental goals or architecture of the project, or they simply don't know how to do it. It would be rude for a user to demand of maintainers more than they're willing to give, and it would be rude of a maintainer not to be at least somewhat mindful that spending at least a little bit of effort to respond to reasonable requests, fix known bugs, and keep documentation accurate and up-to-date can prevent a lot of random strangers from wasting a lot of time on something that isn't useful to them. No one has any contractual obligation to provide anything, but I think everyone should treat other people's time and attention as a scarce and valuable commodity, not to be wasted.

226 points by doubleg 8mo ago

Can you add the year (2018) to the submission title? https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22Open%20Source%20Is%20Not%20About%20You%22&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]

regenschutz 8mo ago

It would be nice to have some context on this. I assume there was some drama regarding this "Cognitect" organisation named. As someone not involved with Clojure at, it's difficult to understand the context for why this post was created.

tom_ 8mo ago
Presumably this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990729 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990729
- squigz 8mo ago
  TFA was posted in 2018; that drama is from the past few days. What connection is there?
  - pixl97 8mo ago
    You're not able to connect these two subjects? A thesis on "don't abuse people in open source" and a bot "abusing people in open source"?
  - tom_ 8mo ago
    But the link to the post was posted here just now! - which I'm assuming means something. Both share a theme: the trials and tribulations of running an open source project, I suppose. Some contributions, one way or another, demand more of them than the maintainer might like. How do you deal with this? How do you set the boundaries? And so on.
    - squigz 8mo ago
      I guess we were responding to different things: my reading of GP's question was why the gist was posted (back in 2018), not why it was shared today. But indeed yes, I can see that connection.
      - tom_ 8mo ago
        I think you're right anyway. Re-reading the post with your comment in mind, I think it's clear enough that this was what was actually meant.
- bee_rider 8mo ago
  There was also a thread about MinIO not being maintained anymore. Hard to say without commentary. Maybe the poster here was influenced by multiple threads (I guess that seems likely, if it was just one thread they influenced them, they could have linked it in that thread).
brazzy 8mo ago
It was a reaction to the State of Clojure Survey 2018 (https://danielcompton.net/clojure-survey-2018 https://danielcompton.net/clojure-survey-2018) and discussions it sparked, in which there were depands for Clojure to change to a more community-driven development process.
doubleg 8mo ago
This was the context back then: https://old.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/a0pjq9/rich_hickey_open_source_is_not_about_you/ealatsq/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/a0pjq9/rich_hickey... I was reminded of this gist when reading the discussion about MinIO (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47000041 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47000041).

rtgfhyuj 8mo ago

[flagged]

jmuguy 8mo ago
What do you mean?

haberman 8mo ago

Lately I'm seeing more and more value in writing down expectations explicitly, especially when people's implicit assumptions about those expectations diverge. The linked gist seems to mostly be describing a misalignment between the expectations of the project owners and its users. I don't know the context, but it seems to have been written in frustration. It does articulate a set of expectations, but it is written in a defensive and exasperated tone. If I found myself in a situation like that today, I would write a CONTRIBUTING.md file in the project root that describes my expectations (eg. PRs are / are not welcome, decisions about the project are made in X fashion, etc.) in a dispassionate way. If users expressed expectations that were misaligned with my intentions, I would simply point them to CONTRIBUTING.md and close off the discussion. I would try to take this step long before I had the level of frustration that is expressed in the gist. I don't say this to criticize the linked post; I've only recently come to this understanding. But it seems like a healthier approach than to let frustration and resentment grow over time.

travisjungroth 8mo ago
> I don't say this to criticize the linked post What you have written is obviously a criticism of the linked post.
- haberman 8mo ago
  If I'm criticizing the linked post, then I'm also criticizing myself, because I could easily imagine having written it.
  - nyeah 8mo ago
    I think some might get the impression that you're complaining about Hickey's tone. Perhaps your emotional terms "frustration," "defensive," and "exasperated" may be the reason.
    - haberman 8mo ago
      I don't see anything wrong with the way he expressed himself, and I think his point is totally legitimate. I mostly just felt bad that he experienced so much grief about it, on account of a gift he was offering to the world.

_slih 8mo ago

[dead]

belval 8mo ago
It's an interesting world for sure, I maintain a somewhat popular package and got a form to fill from a Deloitte consultant about security once. They seemed genuinely confused when I told them I was not going to fill compliance form and make patching commitments for free. Really makes you wonder how many maintainers are letting themselves be taken advantage of.
- joshlemer 8mo ago
  Maybe that would be a good opportunity to offer them a quote for how much you could do the work for.
  - embedding-shape 8mo ago
    Yeah, that's what I do. Anytime anyone from a company sends an email about whatever, who wants me to help them (for their company) in private with something, I ask if they're willing to pay for my time spent on it, maybe 20% says yes. Most of the time they end up getting redirected to use the same venues the rest of the community has access to too.
  - SoftTalker 8mo ago
    Assuming you want to. But if you do, understand that accepting payment for services creates obligation to deliver, and possibly liability for poor performance. You may or may not want that.
- warkdarrior 8mo ago
  Missed opportunity here. You could have offered consulting services, $10,000/hour. Compliance form requires at 40 hours of work minimum.
  - yunnpp 8mo ago

1313ed01 8mo ago

I think community development with repos out in the open and all that is increasingly a too high cost. I will migrate my little open source projects from GitHub as soon as I can decide on what site to post source code releases (tar.gz). Happy to share my code, but no need for everything to be out in the open.

intrasight 8mo ago
I fail to see the difference between public on github or public elsewhere.
- blibble 8mo ago
  codeberg is run as a foundation with the explicit aim to help open source projects prosper github is run by microsoft to sell tools to your CEO with the ultimate aim of making you redundant
- 1313ed01 8mo ago
  No public version control. No issues or pull requests or other social features. Like every project, more or less, before GitHub or Sourceforge.
  - pjmlp 8mo ago
    Well we had RCS, CVS and Usenet groups. And before that, compressed archives on BBS, or type in listings with snail mail.
- LegionMammal978 8mo ago
  IME, on GitHub (or the other major public repo services), it's far more likely than not that I can pull up an old version of a project from 10 years ago if I want to experiment with it. (In case other old things used it as a dependency, I really want to reproduce an old result, etc.) On the vast majority of other distribution platforms, it's at best a 50/50 as to whether (a) the platform still exists with any of its contents, and (b) the authors haven't wiped all the old versions to clear up space or whatever. The former typically fails on academic personal websites (which generally get dumped within 5-15 years), and the latter typically fails on SourceForge-style sites. That is to say, I am not a big fan of the popular alternatives to Git repos as a distribution method.

OrvalWintermute 8mo ago

I feel much better after reading this because our organizations are: - funding OSS developers - engaging with OSS developers to determine potential funding priorities - providing project hardware at the project level - providing hardware to the individual OSS developer While we are not to the point of hosting events in Hawaii yet, I’m hoping we can see this as a teaming arrangement to accomplish great things together!

ge96 8mo ago

Tangent It's funny how a hobby project becomes "a burden" when you have to consider making it friendly/easy to consume by everyone eg. writing docs from the basics like how to make a venv in python, get your env setup...

abadar 8mo ago
I get that. I am a non-programmer who vibe codes personal web apps for Magic: The Gathering and Pokémon TCG. I turn them into github pages for easy access for myself. I don't share them with my hobby communities because I don't want to hear feedback because I don't want these finished projects to become eternal projects.
- ge96 8mo ago
  Curious what does your app do/web app? And how good is the vibe coding part, do you generally get what you're trying to achieve in first few runs? That's cool you're able to make what you want with that tech.
  - abadar 8mo ago
    My latest apps are * Cardsphere (Magic card trading website) wishlist to inventory comparer * Scryfall (Magic card database) search result CSV Downloader * Cube Tagger, an app to easily tag cards with function tags for easy categorizing in cubes (boardgamified collection of Magic cards) The vibe coding part is wonderful because I can "make" the software I want. However, it always takes hours of runs to get to where I need it to be because I'm unpracticed at project planning. I constantly hit critical edge cases and UX problems.
tdrz 8mo ago
One of the issues is that even if you do write documentation, some people that say they want to contribute will not search for it and directly proceed to ask the overworked maintainer to point them to the exact page of the documentation of their interest.
hinkley 8mo ago

patcon 8mo ago

I dislike this essay so much I can't say whether it accomplished its original intent, but my experience is that it's held up in really disappointing situations which sit counter to my collectivist values I have a ton of experience with community-building, and what's espoused in this essay is an attack on the values of that world imho. My take-home is that there are many conceptions of what "open source" is about, and from where its value flows

jamespo 8mo ago
I think "Open source is a licensing and delivery mechanism, period." is a statement that bears repeating.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
ThrowawayTestr 8mo ago
It comes down to beggars asking skilled people for free labor. If the "community" really wants something, they can send a pull request.
- lucketone 8mo ago
  Or.. fork it
sethops1 8mo ago
If you want to create and maintain a community that's fine, maybe even great. TFA is just pointing out that the presence of an OSS license is not an implicit signal that the project is interested in any such community. They're separate things, and my read is that the author is frustrated with the constant conflating of the two. It's not an attack on your values at all.
- throwaway346434 8mo ago
  Quick questions; as this project clearly exists in a community-less vacuum: How do people keep finding and using it? How do complaints or feature requests keep arriving? Why is the published to an audience that doesn't exist? Or is it fair to say the project has published in public, so has contact with a very broad community already?

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 8mo ago

> Sign in to GitHub to continue to Gist That's new Edit: https://web.archive.org/web/20260213161600/https://gist.github.com/richhickey/1563cddea1002958f96e7ba9519972d9 https://web.archive.org/web/20260213161600/https://gist.gith...

hirako2000 8mo ago

Ultimately it is about you. That you are entitled to have say too. That such & such says should be followed, nope. But one could say it's even less about you with close source.

patcon 8mo ago

I'll just leave this here: https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/stars/2024/1 https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/stars/2024/1 Just look at clojure's stats and understand what this "wisdom" brings

ozkatz 8mo ago
correlation does not imply causation
- joshlemer 8mo ago
  But it is evidence for causation.
  - lucketone 8mo ago
    Is it?
    - joshlemer 8mo ago
      Yes. If A is correlated with B, is A more likely to cause B than if A is not correlated with B? Clearly yes.

dakiol 8mo ago

> As a user of something open source you are not thereby entitled to anything at all I understand what the author means, but I think that in any human-2-human interaction, we are all entitled to at least basic courtesy. For example, if you show courtesy by contributing to an open source project and following all the guidelines they have, I think it's fair to assume that courtesy will be shown in return. I know that may be difficult to achieve (e.g., a high volume of noise preventing project authors from giving courtesy to those who deserve it), but that doesn'tt mean we are entitled to nothing. And this has nothing to do with open source or software; it's just common sense when dealing with people. But yeah, if you contribute something of very poor quality (you didn't give it the attention it needed, it's full of bugs, or shows no attention to detail; or these days, it's packed with AI-generated content that makes it 10x harder to digest, even if the intention is good), then perhaps you are not entitled to anything

shermantanktop 8mo ago
You as a first-time contributor need to know that the large group of first-time contributors has a lot of poorly behaved people in it, and that the burden is on you to establish that you are not one of them. Trust is built through iterative exchange. This is Bayesian priors - default is average, and only moves on the introduction of new information. Lots of examples of this. In 1950's westerns, if a stranger comes to a small town, the default treatment is a guarded form of hospitality with a health measure of suspicion. If you are dating someone new, you are by default understood as the average first date partner, and the average first date partner is not a great match.
- awesome_dude 8mo ago
  I'm not saying you're wrong - but I do detest that attitude myself As you say, trust is a two way street, and first time contributors are being expected to trust that it's not personal when they are met with brusquerie. I know it's hard when it's the 99th person and you've had to deal with 98 less than nice individuals, but defaulting to an abrupt or blunt manner does nobody any favours.

0xbadcafebee 8mo ago

Counterpoints: - You are entitled to human decency. Maintainers don't get to be rude just because they run a project. This is a common thing in a lot of projects; maintainers have power, and this allows them to be rude without concern. Not ok. - As a maintainer, if you publish your work as open source, you already acknowledge you are engaging with an entire community, culture, and ethos. We all know how it works: you put a license on your work that (often, but not always) says people need to share their changes. So those people may share their changes back to you, assuming you might want to integrate them. So you know this is going to happen... so you need to be prepared for that. That is a skill to learn. - Since maintainers do owe basic human politeness, and they know people will be interacting with them, maintainers do owe this culture some form of communication of their intentions. If they don't want to take any changes, put that in CONTRIBUTING and turn off GH PRs. If they want to take changes, but no AI changes, put that in CONTRIBUTING. If they don't want to do support, turn off GH Issues. If they require a specific 10-point series of steps before they look at a PR or Issue, put that in CONTRIBUTING. It's on the user to read this document and follow it - but it's on you to create it, so they know how to interface with you. Be polite, and tell people what you will and won't accept in CONTRIBUTING (and/or SUPPORT). Even if it's just "No contributing", "No support". (My personal issue: I spend hours working on preparing an Issue or PR to fix someone's project, and they ignore or close it without a word. Now I don't want to contribute to anything. This is bad for the open source community.)

shermantanktop 8mo ago
Maintainers are sometimes not perfect. But they are providing known value, and you are trying to add something with unknown value. That's an asymmetry which doesn't look like a mutual exchange. So I'd downgrade most of the hard obligations you describe to "it's really smart to do this." I agree with the behavioral observations. People shouldn't be assholes just because they can. That applies to everyone everywhere. Reminding someone with a bit of power to not be a petty tyrant is fine with me.
- hinkley 8mo ago
  I find code I wrote that violates advice I've given other people all the time. I've made release cycle mistakes on projects I maintain that I would have bet money a few years ago that you'd never catch me making. The siren song of One More Commit or One More PR is out there, and there's always going to be some fraction of your work you do that in retrospect you should have slept on, maybe twice. (I recently fixed a problem I've been staring at for a year in an afternoon after a new, stupidly simple solution presented itself on a walk) But there are lines, and you have to be careful not to go across them either too far or too often. Or you have to be utterly indispensable like Linus, and have a thick skin to criticism... like Linus. And if you have a thick skin to criticism you don't write long screeds about how everyone else is wrong and you're right. You just move on.

spaceport 8mo ago

Sometimes you just gotta get the frustration out in a gist

another_twist 8mo ago

I think the issue is answering the question whats the business model ? If the team makes money consulting on clojure, then thats likely a bad model since I have not seen a single example of people paying for advice on coding. Usually the answer is to hire a coder who knows thier stuff and increasingly to use AI. Open source for infrastructure products work just fine. It simplifies distribution by eliminating the need for procurement, builds some kind of attachment since people love using their own tinkered products and hedges risk for the customer since if the devs stop working on the product someone else will pick up. But having to fill out forms, doing compliance work are great money making levers for which you just charge through the nose. Ultimately, open soircing is a distribution strategy and whether you should adopt it or not is dependent on the context. Most infra products do and it works out fine. Case in point: Clickhouse, Kafka, Grafana, Sentry, RedHat, Gitlab.

inoffensivename 8mo ago

I love this article. Nobody owes you a new release, or a signed binary, or a feature you care about.

hinkley 8mo ago
There's a project where almost all the merged PRs since the last release are mine and I'm practically vibrating with trying not making a big deal out of it. It's not unlike how the game I gave someone as a birthday present on Steam has only been played for 2 hours and I'm absolutely certain it'd be his favorite game if he just got out of the character creator and played the goddamned thing. <cleansing breath> It's fine. Everything is fine.

rlnorthcutt 8mo ago

Its an interesting situation when an asset (like an open source project) is run by a team of volunteers (community)... but due to licensing, it kind of belongs to the whole world (community) As a user of a project, I DO have a voice... but unless I am actively contributing (money, time, resources), then my voice has a different weight. On the one hand, I don't like the idea that anyone should get more influence simply because they pay money... or that anyone should have more power just because they are active in the project. Both of those situations are possible paths for corruption or abuse of power. On the other hand, the tragedy of the commons is a real thing. People who take, never give back, and then have the audacity to not only ask but demand things... well, that makes me angry. I've moved from being an idealist to a realist, when it comes to open source. I think the evolving models we are seeing that restrict commercial competition are sometimes pretty good (overall), and the rise in COSS is a positive sign. We need to ensure that good projects have a way to sustain themselves. The best projects have people (or even teams) who are focused on bringing new people in and helping them contribute. Not everyone can do that, but I think finding ways to enable people to contribute (money, time, etc) is an important part of building the community.

blenderob 8mo ago
(edit: I totally misunderstood the parent comment and wrote this reply. I've apologized for it in comment below. I could delete this comment but I am leaving it here so that others don't get confused when they see the replies below it.) > or that anyone should have more power just because they are active in the project. So you are saying that although I create a project to solve my problems but as soon as I make it open source (so that others can also benefit) my power on the project will become equal to the power every random person on earth has on my project? If making my project reduces my power on the project, why would I ever open source anything? Good thing that open source world does not work like that. When I make my project open source, I still have full power on my project and I decide what goes in it and what is rejected. I have no reason to not use the powers I have on the project. If it ever became like you say that as the creator of an open source project, my powers will be equal to the powers of every random user, I'd stop making anything open source.

raincole 8mo ago

> As a user of something open source you are not thereby entitled to anything at all As a user of Hackernews you're not thereby entitled to anything at all. As a member of the thing(forums, discord channels, facebook groups, any online community and real life community) you're not necessarily thereby entitled to anything at all. Even as a user of some proprietary software, you're still not entitled to anything except perhaps critical bugfixes and security updates. Software is sold on shrinkwrap basis. You got what you bought. It doesn't mean expressing your opinions about Hackernews, the thing or some proprietary software, even negative ones, is inherently wrong.

ectospheno 8mo ago
> It doesn't mean expressing your opinions about Hackernews, the thing or some proprietary software, even negative ones, is inherently wrong. I agree. I’ve often wondered why open source maintainers get worked up over this. You can just ignore them. Odds are the maintainer spent zero seconds thinking about the person before the negativity over the course of their entire lives to that point. Why let them have free rent in your head now? Chuckle and go on not thinking about them for the remainder of your life.
- ragall 8mo ago
  There's a very good reason: we need the users to be aware of this, and exert self-restraint in communications with the developer team otherwise public fora become untenable and the core team, to avoid being pestered, will be forced to switch to closed, invite-only, comms channels (private mailing lists, private Discord servers, etc...). It's very valuable to be able to keep publicly accessible channels.

moritzwarhier 8mo ago

But it is about humans in general! Humans who want to use the software, and humans who author (or control dependencies of) the software. Commenting as if this was a comment on yesterday's clawdbot-thread; I know it isn't, and it has previously been submitted here and is a good text. It's about entitlement and using free OSS vs paying for a software product, I know. But I think the gist of this gist can be generalized from "why you should not feel entitled to anything as a FOSS user" to "why software is about humans". Especially because the commercial aspect is not as direct as in paid closed-source software for FOSS, but pressure (including commercial and/or social pressure) still exists. Edit: "still" is not even a fitting word here, because the reliance of commercial software on FOSS is the societal change that causes this change in issue reporting, I'd say. Crowd dynamics / psychological aspects cannot be ignored anywhere.

29athrowaway 8mo ago

Open source has many altruistic and smart people that like to learn and build while benefiting others. But then you also have high ego people motivated by building a personal brand, prestige and status... and open source is just means to that end. While their contributions are valuable, conflicts of interest arise.

didgetmaster 8mo ago

For those who maintain FOSS projects: How often when a user requests/demands your attention to support/fix/enhance the project to suit their particular needs, do they actually pay you something once you explain that what they are asking for, comes with a price?

renewiltord 8mo ago

It balances with ability to fork. So if you’re not happy, then fork.

casey2 8mo ago

You are not entitled to that food or land over there, neither am I. What are we gonna do about it? You're naive if you think your immune to social exploitation just cause you write some words. Your entire being is defined by social exploitation. You adopt our language, our roles etc but you believe you can transcend them when it's convenient. Developers aren't entitled to make people reliant on software and ghost them. I'm sure teachers, firefighters and congress (lol) would all love to stay home and wait out the collapse of society, but they go to work because people rely on them. It's an odd thing for me to build a firetruck, go around pretending to be a firefighter (out compete and make the firefighters lose funding) and then snap back at people expecting me to work for free even though governments do fund open source. If you volunteer as a crossing guard, even if you aren't paid, you have a duty of care. There aren't currently laws against your behavior, but if there is a pattern of such behavior it may be illegal. The EU through the CRA is doing good work in this regard. Of course governments shouldn't compel people to work (>.o). But nobody wants to live in a world of abandoned core infrastructure projects. You aren't an exception, but you thought yourself special when you decided to work for free. Now instead of understanding why people work for money you scrawl against human nature.

lucketone 8mo ago
Could you fix this bug? Please. https://hibernate.atlassian.net/jira/software/c/projects/HHH/issues?jql=project%20%3D%20%22HHH%22%20AND%20statusCategory%20IN%20(%22To%20Do%22%2C%20%22In%20Progress%22)%20ORDER%20BY%20updated%20DESC&selectedIssue=HHH-19917 https://hibernate.atlassian.net/jira/software/c/projects/HHH...

Lammy 8mo ago

> Open source is a licensing and delivery mechanism, period. It means you get the source for software and the right to use and modify it. Once again confusing the two and proving that “Open Source” was the worst thing to ever happen to “Free Software”

Joel_Mckay 8mo ago

Some businesses confuse Sales with racketeering with a computer. People don't want to hear your pitch deck every time they use a product, or budget for something critical to their operations every month. FOSS is simply computer users doing what they have always done, and accomplishing things no one (or no company) could ever do on their own. For those that paid tens of thousands of dollars to keep the office talent happy with what they know software wise, it has been my observation the training and support is often still missing on the commercial options as well... once they get paid. Finally, most become locked into a vendors up-sold ecosystem as they choke off compatibility with other external product workflows. And you can't add something to fit your specific use-case, as single users don't matter in business products. FOSS is usually better in almost every way most of the time, but often lacks stability as upstream projects continuously undergo permutation. Note, even the old closed-source Nvidia GPU drivers in kernel <6.0.8 are now abandoned in >6.15 to send a lot of old Linux laptops to the landfill. Confusing skill issues with the realty of the software business is common. =3

M95D 8mo ago

This is the attitude that made me keep my patches to myself. Hey, you, FOSS maintainer, whoever you are: - If you make your project public, it means you want and expect people to use it. You could at least write some documentation, so I don't waste my time and then find out, days later, it isn't capable of what I need or I simply don't know how to use it. - If you set up a bug tracker, then at least have the decency to answer bug reports. Bugs make it unusable. Someone took the time to write those bug reports. I'm not asking to fix them (I lost that hope decades ago), but at least you could give a one line answer or 2-line guidance for some another person that might want to try a fix - "I don't have time to fix it, sorry, but it's probably because of <that thing> in <that file>." I mean, you wrote the stuff! One minute of thinking on your part is the same as 6 hours of digging for someone who never saw the code before. - If you open it up to pull requests, it means you want people to contribute. Have the decency to review them. Someone took time away from their jobs, families or entertainment to write those PRs. Ignoring them because you don't need that feature, not affected by the bug, or simply because of code aesthetics is an insult to the one who wrote it. PS: - And no, don't expect someone else to write the documentation for your code. Same as the bugs: 1 minute of your time is 6 hours of work for someone else. If you can't do at least these things, just say it's abandoned on the front page and be done with it.

ForceBru 8mo ago
Yeah, I didn't like that attitude either. > As a user of something open source you are not thereby entitled to anything at all. You are not entitled to contribute. You are not entitled to features. You are not entitled to the attention of others. You are not entitled to having value attached to your complaints. You are not entitled to this explanation. Sure, I'm not entitled to anything. At the same time, this text essentially says "you don't matter", which I personally don't like.
- bigbadfeline 8mo ago
  Right, it sounds like "you don't matter to me", which I read as "Oops, wrong address, go find somebody else". The bigger problem here is that the OP author is pretending to be a speaker for all open source, I guess there's no other way to justify the uncompromising attitude he somehow developed. AI will undoubtedly change how OSS works, bot-submited PRs can be overwhelming, authors should not despair though, where there's a will, there's a way.

jaredcwhite 8mo ago

I don't know why people keep sharing this. It's highly offensive and inflammatory. Plenty of open source projects consider themselves a community which welcome newcomers, take governance seriously, and ensure that even if suggestions or contributions are rejected, it's done in a thoughtful and considerate way. Acting like a jerk isn't a blueprint for how to be a good maintainer, it's how to be a jerk. And this "us experts vs. entitled users" mentality is cultural poison.

k33n 8mo ago
Calling someone a jerk for their views on how OSS should or shouldn’t function isn’t appropriate. It’s actually completely out of line and smacks of the very entitlement described in the piece. Don’t agree with his views? Go make your own project and run it however you want. Cultural poison? The truly cultured understand that a monoculture would be the real poison. There’s room for all modes of operation in OSS. Without “jerks”, there’d be no Linux and there would be nothing else of high value either. If you want to sit around and hold hands then find a project where they do that, or maybe just take up finger painting.
ragall 8mo ago
> It's highly offensive and inflammatory. It is sane and factually correct. > Plenty of open source projects consider themselves a community which welcome newcomers, take governance seriously Rich is taking governance very seriously. Others aren't and give nobodies the right to vote. In any case, he's factually correct. Nothing in open source implies anything about any type of governance, as "Open source is a licensing and delivery mechanism, period". > Acting like a jerk Pot, meet kettle.
- throwaway346434 8mo ago
  You might need to go back and read that one again, this is the faintest criticism of a lengthy screed in which the person you are replying to labels user-hostile behaviours as "acting like a jerk" and generally disapproves. Your counter argument to this is to just be contrarian and imply they are a jerk... because, well, you don't agree with them. You didn't add substance to the discussion (facts, evidence, argument seeking middle ground), you just sought to set fire to someone because you were uncomfortable with the dim prospect you might be wrong/guilty of acting like this/be the subject of the criticism. Do you see how this undermines your point of view/actually re-enforces the validity of the criticism?

hinkley 8mo ago

I don’t disagree with Rich Hickey a lot but this one grinds my gears: > All social impositions associated with it, including the idea of 'community-driven-development' are part of a recently-invented mythology with little basis in how things actually work, Open source is effectively a gift economy. And we actually talked about it being so in the late 90’s early 00’s. Gift economies are older than human civilization. This is not a recently invented thing, nor is it a mythology. They have rules about how much either party can impose upon the other. Yes people on the receiving end of those gifts can be entitled brats. That doesn’t negate all social contract on the other side, until it escalates far beyond propriety. Edit to add: Rich’s sense of authority to say things like this comes not from his prowess in writing code, which is noteworthy, but from his substantial participation in that gift economy that he is negating here. That entitlement he feels to say something is how gift economies work. Those who gave more have the authority to comment on what happens next.

bigstrat2003 8mo ago
No, he's completely right on that point. There's this weird misconception in the tech community that "open source" means "you'll accept my contributions if I send them". I've seen people try to argue (in complete seriousness) that SQLite isn't open source because the developers keep contributions private. I don't know where the mistaken conflating of "open source" and "developed by the community" comes from, but it is mistaken, and Rich was quite right to push back on it.
- hinkley 8mo ago
  I’m not disagreeing that people get entitled about the gifts they think they’re bringing to someone else’s party. Yeah it’s frustrating and sometimes it’s bonkers. Don’t bring “lutefisk” to someone else’s party and expect to be celebrated as a hero. That doesn’t absolve the host of all scrutiny in perpetuity, and that’s usually how these conversations go. This is a popularity contest and trying to have that conversation with, frankly, people who have never one a popularity contest is exhausting. But you still have to point out things to your unrepentant friend even if they don’t seem to listen. It’s not a conflation. Open source is two things. One, a way to trick your boss into letting you keep using tools you developed here at your next job. Two, a gift economy we are all participating in. Gift economies are a community. Whether you want it to be or not, it is. That we listen to Rich Hickey at all is almost entirely down to the latter. He has given many gifts and this entitled to a soapbox precisely because of the gifts. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. Suck it up buttercup. Or, continue to act confused and indignant as people call you and people like you out for the rest of time. It’s not going to stop.

bachmeier 8mo ago

> Open source is a no-strings-attached gift, and all participants should recognize it as such. I've always felt this is incorrect. First, because lots of people use open source to further their careers, it isn't. Open source contributions are paid work if you benefit from them in any way. Second, if you use open source yourself, your work is no longer a gift. You're contributing back to the community you've taken from. The person you're being a jerk to because it's a "gift" might be the author of other software you've used.

yunnpp 8mo ago
Why is this down-voted? Everything we do in this industry rests upon somebody else's gift of free/open software, that is the reality of it. I do feel an inclination to contribute back however I can, even if it's just documentation, or submitting a (properly detailed) bug report, for precisely the reason described here.
ragall 8mo ago
It is correct. Just because your livelihood might hinge on a specific project doesn't mean that its developers have any obligation to accept your patches. It means you have to be very careful in choosing which project you hitch your wagon. Obligations are created, in order, through law, contracts or personal relationships. If you have neither, you have nothing.
- bachmeier 8mo ago
  > It is correct. Just because your livelihood might hinge on a specific project doesn't mean that its developers have any obligation to accept your patches. I think you responded to the wrong comment, since I didn't say anything about being obligated to accept patches.
  - ragall 8mo ago
    I responded to "You're contributing back to the community you've taken from" which implies that one has some obligation to accept a patch (calling it a contribution). Just because you're offering doesn't mean that others are obliged to accept or even review it.

nunez 8mo ago

I don't know. On one hand, they're totally right; their project, their rules. On the other hand, it feels crappy to contribute to an open source project that doesn't actually take contributions (or derides new contributors because they made a mistake in their diff or PR due to missing a sentence in their gigantic contributing doc) or use a project that silently changed hands and is now full of tracking, malware and other junk.

waffletower 8mo ago

"You are not entitled to this explanation." After reading this, I immediately heard the song "I Don't Care About You" by Fear (https://open.spotify.com/track/6kuSvl812VLLpFhPegnCfY?si=2a01a316564d4220 https://open.spotify.com/track/6kuSvl812VLLpFhPegnCfY?si=2a0...) in my head.

ertucetin 8mo ago

I just fucking love this guy.

tegiddrone 8mo ago

A tiresome sysadmin I've been talking to is under the impression of: "well, if <open-core-saas> stagnates or otherwise shifts focus away from our interests then someone will just fork it, duh!" .. when glancing thru Discord successors

dang 8mo ago

Related. Others? Open Source Is Not About You (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39905557 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39905557 - April 2024 (1 comment) Open source is not about you (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31957554 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31957554 - July 2022 (205 comments) Open Source Is Not About You (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27003713 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27003713 - May 2021 (5 comments) Open Source is Not About You - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18538123 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18538123 - Nov 2018 (277 comments)

notepad0x90 8mo ago

if you publish something to the public, you are responsible for it to a degree. You can't just say "i'm not responsible" and avoid responsibility. "I put rat poison in candies and put it outside my door for halloween, but it had a sign that says 'The owner is not responsible for any harm or effects resulting from consuming these candies'" , see how silly that sounds? If you advertise your software as intended to do a thing, licenses might protect you legally, but not morally or ethically, from people attempting to use it, and relying on it. Imagine if the maintainers of glibc decided to backdoor it, but since they're not responsible for it, and you're on your own for using it, it's not their fault right? If the maintainers of openssl decided to drop sha256 support, they're not responsible for the chaos that ensues right? FFS! how clueless are devs sometimes. It's insane. This right here is the worst part of open source. Don't use open source! that's the message here. If you're in the EU, and you're seeing all these efforts to rely on open source software to avoid American-made software, read this post! Don't use open source software because the authors of that software could sabotage their work or do anything they want with the software and they feel like they have no obligation to anyone. Does that sound familiar? At least American big-tech gets fined on a regular bases for doing nasty things, at least they have executives you can imprison if needed be. And they're not under any illusion that "i'm not responsible" is a get out of jail free card. Use only properly supported software. I'm a bit salty, because I've relied on and supported Open Source software several times before. Every. Single. Time. Even when i'm creating PRs, they're dicks about it. Even when I create issues. Who cares, they're not even responsible enough to refuse support. Here is what should be done, if most devs really agree with this take: You can write any software you want, but publishing it to the public should only be permitted after you pass tests, like your identity being verified, support process being established,etc... You can't just give away food, vehicles, houses, just about anything you can think of without some requirement of that sort. If devs are going out of their way like this to be irresponsible, then the chaos and damage they cause must be mitigated. When you "Open" anything, it could be a door, software, a canister of nerve-gas; you're responsible for what comes out of it and how it affects others. you're also responsible for what happens when others enter it. The only way around this I can think of is if perhaps in every way a person can download or access your software, publish a clear and unmistakable warning "Do not use this software for any reason at all. Do not read the source code. Do not attempt to build it, or run it." even then, you're not free from all responsibility. It's like malware authors that put disclaimers like "for educational purposes only" on their malware publications. you'll still go to prison, it isn't a defense. I'm not claiminng random people have entitlements to get their PRs approved, or issues resolved. But for developers to go so far as show hostility towards people who use their software, is not far from actually publishing harmful software. A good and reasonable balance might be that software that's used by more than a certain threshold of people should be required to either support their software, or close-source it. You have free-speech, not the right to put the public in harm's way. Honestly, I think this sort of whining is what is driving all these verification laws and restrictions. I think being glad people are using your software so much, and they're requesting support, creating PRs, and so on is the right attitude with open source software. If you get mad about all that, you're hurting the freedoms of open source devs all over by trying to make your software open for the sake of clout or whatever. And really, don't publish a repository to the public if you expect no contribution. Just host tarball on your site. "Open source is not about you", yeah, sure, it isn't about irresponsible devs getting free advertisement and farming clout either.

palata 8mo ago

If someone gives ice cream for free in the street, we don't say "you should have the decency to provide chairs and tables so that we can enjoy our ice cream", do we? Open source users have to understand that when they benefit from an open source project, it's like receiving a gift in the street. You don't get to ask for more: either you accept the gift, or you don't. If you go an complain because they should have a vegan option or different flavours, you are the problem.

elihu 8mo ago

The other side of this is that if you want your open source project to be useful to people, relevant, included by default in Linux distributions, highly regarded by the community, and so on then it's expected that you treat your users well. Not every project aspires to such things, but if you do then the path to success requires at a minimum not treating users as a burden. Some users might be particularly rude or entitled, in which case you can politely decline their feature requests and move on. Basically, it's never rude for a user to file a bug report or request a feature. It's never rude for the maintainer to decline to implement a feature if they haven't budgeted time (or other relevant resources) to do it, it doesn't align with the fundamental goals or architecture of the project, or they simply don't know how to do it. It would be rude for a user to demand of maintainers more than they're willing to give, and it would be rude of a maintainer not to be at least somewhat mindful that spending at least a little bit of effort to respond to reasonable requests, fix known bugs, and keep documentation accurate and up-to-date can prevent a lot of random strangers from wasting a lot of time on something that isn't useful to them. No one has any contractual obligation to provide anything, but I think everyone should treat other people's time and attention as a scarce and valuable commodity, not to be wasted.