[psychstudio]

This article is written for you, yet you still can not see the problem? Think about it for a moment.

* Does the maintainer have any obligation to you, or anyone else?

* Are you entitled to anything at all from the maintainer?

* Is the maintainer in any way at all responsible for your "professional costs" for using their software?

[brabel]

You're completely right, but I think the point the parent comment was making is that big OSS frameworks like React in JS world, Spring in the Java world, Android/Flutter in mobile/UI and many more are basically central to applications. You can't switch away... If they have a bug and refuse to fix it even when you submit a patch, forking those projects is almost completely unfeasible (in the case applications run on their platform, like Android, it's impossible). Google and Facebook are not going to take payment from you to fix bugs they don't care about either. It's a game stopper...

The solution is, of course, not rely on any big-corp internal framework like that if your existence depends on those... but there would be a lot fewer businesses around if everyone did that.

[zaphar]

There are all kinds of articles that have popped up on HN about a company that did a rewrite because one of those frameworks was no longer appropriate for them. The article that come across the best are always the articles where it's not condemning a framework but instead talking about the engineering tradeoffs inherent in what we do.

If a company structured their software in such a way that this is more costly than they can afford them be transparent about it. Choices were made. Those choices no longer fit our needs. New choices need to be made. The company can either learn from the mistake and pay the costs or they can slowly sink under the weight of bad engineering decisions over time.

It is possible to structure any application in such a way that you can easily pull out your core pieces and put them into a different framework. If you didn't and instead bet too heavily on a single framework then yeah, you might be stuck with really expensive decisions.

[psychstudio]

That's the price of libre!