[stdbrouw]

Most of the comments here remind me of the famous Neil Gaiman quote, "George R.R. Martin is not your bitch." [1] But I don't think that's the right framing. People buy the first book because they hope there will be a second, even though they haven't paid for that second book and hence are not entitled to it. People use your open-source project because you said, hey, here's this exciting new thing, try it out, so they assume you'd also want to listen when it doesn't quite work as it should. That's not about a false sense of entitlement or callousness on the part of your users at all. It's also not about freeloading, because a lot of those pull requests and issues on Github will be coming from people who publish their own open-source software. Instead, it's about managing expectations, like the post does. Put a big "this project is not maintained" warning on top, and nobody will bother you. Although I do understand that for larger active projects, it can be hard to explain to users exactly where on the spectrum between "don't bother me" and "I'll fix your problem yesterday" you are, and the bigger a project gets, the more likely you'll be to encounter people who enjoy exploiting your free labor.

[1] https://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/05/entitlement-issues.ht...

[uranusjr]

> People use your open-source project because you said, hey, here's this exciting new thing, try it out, so they assume you'd also want to listen when it doesn't quite work as it should.

> Put a big "this project is not maintained" warning on top, and nobody will bother you.

I think this is exactly the problem. The author never promises they would maintain the software, nor expect their definition of “this works” to match the users’. Why do they need to put up a sign in the first place for people to not assume? “Expecting things that were never promised” is pretty much the definition of self-entitlement. IMO this should be entirely the other way around. People should not expect anything unless the authors say they are willing to maintain.

[henrydark]

This makes a ton of sense. In some communities.

It's a bit similar to what is the expected relationship between Alice and Bob after Alice saves Bob from drowning.

In some communities, Bob needs to be thankful for Alice for the rest of his life, with no more expectations of her.

In others, Alice is now responsible for Bob for the rest of her life.

[stdbrouw]

Do you only ever expect things that were explicitly promised? If you go to a job interview, are you self-entitled because you expect a phone call afterwards even if that wasn't spelled out?

[otikik]

It's funny, because I think I have pretty much the opposite expectation.

When I encounter a new open source project it means that I can make it better by providing pull requests with new features, or fixing bugs. And then everyone benefits. If they choose to listen to me that's fine, but that's the icing on the cake, not the main course.

[jcbrand]

There are people like that, and they're usually great to have on an OSS project, but they're a minority.