[shinratdr]

This is a great example of why large parts of the open source community are complete clusterfucks. There have been some amazing programs and services that emerge from this model, but by and large all projects have the same caveats: Nobody takes overall responsibility, everybody contributor is an unquestionable Jesus character, every contribution is a donation with strings attached, expecting the status quo to be maintained on a popular project is unabashed entitlement.

It's not like his standpoint is wrong, or incorrect, even selfish or unreasonable. Yet it does still damage the community and nobody will take responsibility for said damage. This is why people get paid for things. No matter how altruistic your intentions and actions, if people come to rely on your service then they will be upset and frustrated when it disappears.

TL;DR - He's right, he doesn't owe anyone anything. That doesn't make his actions any less damaging though, and simply glossing over this as "user entitlement" is ignoring a systemic problem with unfunded open source projects.

[rue]

Paid-for projects go under all the time. This is nothing particularly unique to open source except that with OSS, someone can actually take over.

People just couldn't be bothered to, and are now paying the price.

[shinratdr]

Actually no, people don't just take their ball and go home like this in funded proprietary projects that aren't maintained by very small teams. If he was a paid for contributor, he would have handed off the domain no question. Because it wouldn't have been his to keep in the first place, it would have belonged to the project collective.

Smaller proprietary get shut down and money dries up, but nobody simply throws a wrench into the machine quite like up and leaving a project but taking project resources with you like that. It simply doesn't happen outside of the open source community, and it is a unique problem. Branding it as a simple shutdown is also glossing over the problem.

[bad_user]

Personally I would rather have people contribute to open-source and quit when they want. I rather prefer the "clusterfucks" you mention, versus the alternative.

That's the nature of open-source that people don't understand: it's not about getting stuff for free, although that's a nice side-effect. Instead it's about having the freedom to fork it.

So if you find yourself in such a situation, either donate enough money to keep the maintainer happy or step up and contribute.

[shinratdr]

> So if you find yourself in such a situation, either donate enough money to keep the maintainer happy or step up and contribute.

I think saying essentially "throw unlimited funds at it with no promise of a solution or 'patch it yourself'" is also simply glossing over the problem. "I prefer it" is a great justification for you, it doesn't solve the issue for anyone else though and it's not a productive line of thinking.

[moonchrome]

>throw unlimited funds at it with no promise of a solution or 'patch it yourself'

Riighht... because support, contractors/integrators don't exist in the open source world.

The fact that the source is available is just another fallback on top of others. As someone who actually deployed closed source systems in production I can't even begin to describe how superior the opensource alternative is. Basically putting your project at the mercy of some corporate third world tech support department and three layers of bullshit between you and the guy writing code, priced as gold. When you trace down race conditions in binaries/using DTrace and send a detailed description of the problem only to get to some Indian dude who doesn't even understand what you're trying to communicate - "dropping down to source and patch it yourself" is a utopia and being able to hire the guy who wrote it or sent patches is a dream.

[shinratdr]

Such a specialized situation it's not even worth discussing.

[earl]

So what you're saying is most open source communities are like the onion article: "Report: 98 Percent Of U.S. Commuters Favor Public Transportation For Others" [1]. Someone should step up and provide hosting and maven repos and blah blah blah... but not me. Which makes you wonder if there's really a community or it's just a handful of people donating to charity and a thousand people taking.

[1] http://www.theonion.com/articles/report-98-percent-of-us-com...

[shinratdr]

Or alternatively, that there is a very good reason most transactions in life are simple exchanges of funds for goods or services.