💾 Archived View for dioskouroi.xyz › thread › 29349857 captured on 2021-11-30 at 20:18:30. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
________________________________________________________________________________
_All in all, open sourcing a thing means taking responsibility for it. You're making a statement that the thing will be available, updated, and real._
I don't think it has to be this way. I think it's perfectly fine to say, "Sorry, I don't have time to maintain this project, if you want to fork it, be my guest." That is the beauty of open-source. Unlike proprietary code, I at least have the possibility of diagnosing and fixing the problem myself, with or without the maintainer's cooperation.
Yeah not to mention the incentives are perverse, like making paramedics liable for murder if the gravely wounded patient are treating dies to protect the patients. It discourages what it claims to serve. The whole point of open source is to make it more available. That would
There's a certain "buyer beware" quality to open-source stuff, and I think that's okay. You can see the sausage, after all. Maybe I just have low expectations, but I don't think there's a perpetual obligation on the part of creators to maintain the thing they released into the wild.
> There's a certain "buyer beware" quality to open-source stuff
It's not a quality of open source. It's a quality of specific things, and not of other things. Just like with proprietary software.
The only difference is that you need to beware a little less with open source, so more people are willing to.
While I greatly appreciate open source, I don't think I can generally "beware a little less" with open source. On the plus side, I can generally be confident that an open-source program will not disappear and become completely unavailable to society. On the minus side, for less popular open-source projects, the usual lack of a reliable software-development business model makes me wary of the likelihood that a the project will keep being reliably maintained in the near term and will stay alive in the long term. Personally, I place greater trust and hope in specialized, usually-closed-source programs sold by small companies that are financially invested in maintaining and improving those programs.
I doubt that it'd be easy for an abandoned, mildly popular open-source project to be revived by someone other than its creators. Whenever such a project is abandoned by its creators, I tend to lose hope that it will ever be revived, that new features will ever be added, or that existing bugs will ever be removed.
+1
At Khan Academy, we adopted a policy around open sourcing projects that talks about the _communication_ of the project's status. We want to open source stuff (we're a non-profit learning organization, after all!), but we don't want to have to spend a lot of time maintaining non-core open source. As long as we tell people the maintenance status of a project, I think we're fine.
Agreed: anyone who releases closed-source software has some level of moral obligation to maintain it because the users can't do so.
Open-source removes this limitation, and anyone could (in theory) maintain it to suit their needs.
Very much agreed. Such a responsibility can come, e.g. when you push other people to use your project over alternatives, but the pure act of open-sourcing does not. Something to be said for clearly communicating intentions though, e.g. if you don't intend on spending time on contributions it doesn't hurt to just explicitly note that.
As said in the MIT license:
> The software is provided "As is", without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including but not limited to the warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and noninfringement. In no event shall the authors or copyright holders be liable for any claim, damages or other liability, whether in an action of contract, tort or otherwise, arising from, out of or in connection with the software or the use or other dealings in the software.
In the GPL V2 license:
> There is no warranty for the program, to the extent permitted by applicable law. Except when otherwise stated in writing the copyright holders and/or other parties provide the program “as is” without warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied, including, but not limited to, the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose. The entire risk as to the quality and performance of the program is with you. Should the program prove defective, you assume the cost of all necessary servicing, repair or correction.
It's usually in full uppercase too.
>I don't think it has to be this way.
There are significant / very vocal people demand open source to be about the _community_. And Community Driven. And dumping code out isn't very "open source" by their standards.
> I at least have the possibility of diagnosing and fixing the problem myself, with or without the maintainer's cooperation.
In reality people do this with closed source software all the time, most especially visible in gaming where unofficial patches are often the only reason an older game will run on a modern OS.
Shoutout to someone using the term "emotional labor" correctly!