[rckoepke]

It seems much of the disagreement may stem from lack of consensus around the semantics of:

'responsibility'

'requirement' 'obligation' 'should' 'can'

I believe responsibilities are personal/societal. They're part of a value system. However, I think I could collate a breadth of sources from landmark open source discussions which show that there are existing major themes for what a maintainer has a responsibility to do (that the open source community has a somewhat predefined value system existing wrt to topic).

I accept that it's not a consensus.

I just don't think we should conflate obligations, requirements, and responsibilities. That leads to vehement disagreements.

[bpt3]

> I believe responsibilities are personal/societal. They're part of a value system. However, I think I could collate a breadth of sources from landmark open source discussions which show that there are existing major themes for what a maintainer has a responsibility to do (that the open source community has a somewhat predefined value system existing wrt to topic).

I agree with all of this, but I also feel that you need to be mentally prepared for any maintainer to fail to meet these moral responsibilities unless you want to be disappointed and should act accordingly (not saying you don't already do this in practice).

> I accept that it's not a consensus. I just don't think we should conflate obligations, requirements, and responsibilities. That leads to vehement disagreements.

I agree 100%.