[jandrewrogers]

Great article. Like many other people, I largely stopped contributing to open source years ago because people don’t respect boundaries. If you point out that they are not respecting boundaries, many will try to argue that they are entitled to this behavior because reasons. Long term, this dynamic is what is going to kill most OSS by people doing it for the love of it.

Unless you are making a lot of money by doing it, the act of sharing source code often has a negative return.

[boris]

Everyone agrees the unreasonable entitlement of many OSS users is bad but I don't see much analysis of where this entitlement comes from. Maybe it's the loss aversion: you first gift them the software but then by refusing to maintain it or add the feature that they need, you effectively take it away or, at least, suggest that they will have to pay for this gift after all (by implementing what they want themselves or paying someone to do it).

It could be the same dynamic with the "license rug pull", like in the Redis case discussed the other day. The new Redis license seems like it would be a non-issue for most users but because they had a more liberal license before and it was taken from them, they feel irrational sense of loss? (I realize there are also valid reasons why the BSD license was objectively better than the new custom license, like the ease of compliance.)

So maybe what Redis should have done is not to pull the existing rug, so to speak, but to leave it be and lay next to it a new, better rug and offer the users sitting on the old rug to move over, if they find the new features of the new rug outweigh the drawbacks of a new license.

[akalsey]

My wife runs an estate sale company, helping families dispose of property. Sometimes the family wants her to give something away. She hates that. It’s way more work for her than selling it for even $1.

She says, “There’s no one more entitled than someone you’re giving something to for free.”

People responding to an ad for a free item will ask her to deliver it, load it, store it, repair it, and warranty it.

My theory is that folks who seek something out because it’s free tend to have more time than money. And that means they don’t value time very much.

[thephyber]

I believe Daniel Kahneman did a cognitive science study that pointed out similar concepts related to a day care that used to stay with kids after hours for free, then charged parents a fee for staying late, then removed the fee.[1]

The core takeaway is that there is a stark difference in how people treat a social obligation versus a pay-transaction, and even attempting to switch back to the prior relationship doesn’t necessarily work.

My experience is that friends and family frequently give things / items / services to the ones they love and feel social obligations / responsibilities to. I think Open Source Abusive Freeloaders think they are in this category with Open Source Maintainers, but Open Source is a strange hybrid of social obligation to people we have no friend/family/community relationship with, so some people are completely missing the expected behavior standards.

Also interesting, I saw a high profile tech journalist Dave Winder) have a mini meltdown venting about a very similar abuse of his time by strangers on LinkedIn recently.

[1] https://econlife.com/2018/09/unintended-consequences-from-fi...

[sph]

Sorry but the linked article shows the exact opposite phenomenon: when parents had to pay a late-arrival fee, the number of late parents noticeably increased.

In open source the free-loaders are the entitled ones, expecting maintainers to move mountains to accomodate them.

In fact, I am led to believe that they superficially look the same, but are very different phenomenons with very different results. I feel that the open source maintainer burnout is not driven by price, but by sheer scale of reaching so many "customers" worldwide of any type, which includes nasty people. If 1% of people are narcissists, and your modest library on GitHub is used by 100,000 people, you'll have to deal with 1,000 potential entitled idiots, which is very stressful for a non-paid volunteer job. I bet that if your library was sold for a nominal price, as your link shows, you'd get even more entitled users. The fact is that not many paid products reach as many users as any average open source project. Most of the world is much poorer than the Western countries, and their only choice often is open source.

[tda]

This is also my observation. The cheaper I sell stuff on the local version of craigslist, the lower the quality of the buyers. No shows, non responsive to messages, whatever. I gave up on putting up stuff for free.

The reason I put it up for free is that I value not having the item more than having it, so much more that I don't care about the 10 or maybe 100 euro that I could theoretically get for it. The idea is putting it up for free will let me quickly get rid of it, and instead of throwing something useful away, maybe someone will be happy with it. In practice this rarely works, I now much better understand why some people with limited time just toss out whatever they don't need. Getting it into someone else's hands is just too much work. The environmental impact is horrible though

Another insight: whenever i donate my time fro free (volunteer work), my time is not valued at all. We start with a 30min coffee break with strangers I have no real interest in. Then a speech thanking so and so, and then someone starts preparing and finally after over an hour I can start contributing with whatever is the cause I want to help with. What a waste...

If I charged my normal rate everyone would be prepared and make sure they make the most effective use of my hours.

So this is such a paradox: people under value what is free, so giving something for free is not appreciated enough for me to do it.

Final observation: I run a repair-cafe, and a very significant portion of appliances people come by with are cheap, ireppairable junk (often nespresso and senseo coffee machines, but also toasters etc). Im am suspecting that the people that buy more expensive coffee machines (the ones that are serviceable) are less inclined to actually take the time to repair it and just discard and buy new

[dolmen]

> I run a repair-cafe, and a very significant portion of appliances people come by with are cheap, ireppairable junk (often nespresso and senseo coffee machines, but also toasters etc). Im am suspecting that the people that buy more expensive coffee machines (the ones that are serviceable) are less inclined to actually take the time to repair it and just discard and buy new

Or the machines that are serviceable already have professionnal services that owner can reach and they will provide both repair and parts. The repair café is a last chance before junkyard.

[tda]

That may aso be a factor, but in general machines under 500 euro cannot be repaired economically as it easily costs 100-200 before the manufacturer even has a look. And this usually results in replacing a subassembly like the entire PCB at a very inflated price of say 200. I wouldn't be surprised if the economical-to-repair threshold is well over 1000 for a lot of product categories. Third party professional repairers are all but extinct. Only for certain specific product categories (e.g. washing machines) you still have them. But as most washing machines cost around 500 euro, and are expected to last only 5 years, I would think the number of repairers are declining (why repair a 3 year old 400 euro machine for 250, for at most another 2 years of utility if a new one can be had for 400?).

I would love to know if there are professional shops where one can get e.g. a capacitor on a PCB replaced, but as far as I am aware all these kinds of repairs are done by amateurs in garages like myself.

The other day someone even gave me a broken 750 euro Jura coffee machine. The owner was not interested in getting it back, they had happily switched to nespresso. Still haven't figured out why the pcb will not power on the heater though

[latexr]

Or maybe they last longer, on account of not being junk, to the point that when they finally break they are so outdated the people decide to upgrade instead of repairing.

[neilv]

IME, listing stuff for free gets a lot of people who are cognitively impaired, such as by drugs or some mental illness.

There may also be "choosing beggars", but they seem to be in the minority, and I'm not sure they're distinct from the more general group above.

It also gets flippers (people who grab/buy things to immediately resell them), who are not at all impaired, but some of them are trying to maximize their profit. So if some of them impose, flake, deceive, etc., I get the impression that's all intentional, to make someone else bear their cost of their optimization.

Ways I've found to avoid these people: (1) post to a free-stuff list of a nearby university, where it generally reaches penny-pinching students; (2) post on a public list, like CraigsList, but with an ostensibly nonzero price, then tell the person it's free; (3) put it on the curb with a FREE sign.

[throwaway2037]

There is an old joke. How do you get rid of a bunch of old junk that nobody wants? Most people would suggest to put it in front of your house with a sign that says: "Free". You will notice that almost no one takes anything. The solution? Change the sign to say: "Any item is X dollars". Then, people will quickly steal everything!

[akalsey]

A co-worker mentioned they had a desk at the end of their driveway with a free sign on it for over a week with no takers.

I told them to put a $10 sign on it and someone would steal it.

It was gone the next morning.

[jandrewrogers]

Everything you are talking about is precisely the undue sense of entitlement that drives people away from contributing to open source. They owe you and everyone else nothing. Not their time, not their attention, not anything. The sense of entitlement to other people’s labor is grotesque.

You are free to fork the code and make it your problem to do the things you think the original code authors should be doing. That is your only right. Yet curiously many of the complainants don’t do this.

[boris]

I think you are missing my point: I am not saying there is no entitlement or that it's not bad (I've been on the receiving end to know it's true). I am merely wondering where it's coming from. Culturally, at least most of us, are conditioned to reciprocate.

[jandrewrogers]

Fair, I don’t mean to misinterpret your point. I am somewhat triggered because so many people do miss the point.

I think people (and governments!) take OSS like a “public accommodation”, without the recognition that the concept of public accommodations are legally predicated on the existence of a business with control over usage and cost. OSS is not a public accommodation but everyone treats it as such, much to the detriment of contributors.

[rob74]

> I don't see much analysis of where this entitlement comes from

Might I propose one possible reason? Take, for example, the Node.js ecosystem. Someone, a while back, built some library, added it to npm, then people used that module in their projects (maybe as a dependency of another module), along with thousands of other modules, and built an application on top of it. So they don't even really know that they are using the project, have no idea about who contributed to it, never saw its page on GitHub etc. Then, maybe years later, when the project is abandoned and flagged as risky by various codebase scanning tools, some poor developer (who maybe wasn't even involved in the initial decision of using Node for the project) will have to find an alternative for the module (and possibly others that depend on it and are also unmaintained). So maybe in this case it's frustration rather than entitlement?

[NGRhodes]

Some people treat all open source projects as products that they use, when many are labours of love and charity, sometimes pet projects that have become useful to [many] others. They expect product support at a business level like all the other software they use. They see the project's website as a place to get support for their product, not a place to contribute.

[throwaway2037]

    > So maybe what Redis should have done is not to pull the existing rug, so to speak, but to leave it be and lay next to it a new, better rug and offer the users sitting on the old rug to move over, if they find the new features of the new rug outweigh the drawbacks of a new license.

Can you provide more specifics about your idea? It sounds like Redis would need to maintain two version. Can your ideas be implemented with the same cost structure? I doubt it.

[devsda]

I'm referring to my own comment, but I think they are suggesting something close to this[1].

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=devsda#42385023

[boris]

Yes, pretty much. I think it would also be good (but admittedly risky) to accept third-party contributions (even new features) to the old version. In other words, instead of trying to force people to use a new license they could have tried to entice them.

[eviks]

> not to pull the existing rug, so to speak, but to leave it be

How is this different from just using the old version before the "rug pull"?

[boris]

They could still maintain it by, say, backporting bug fixes. And also accept contributions from people who prefer to stay on the old rug. It is extra effort for them and it is risky (everyone might end up staying on and contributing to the old rug turning it into the new new rug), but that's the price they would be paying for the goodwill.

[eviks]

Ok, so that's not "leave it be", that's improving both rugs

[sabbaticaldev]

> but that's the price they would be paying for the goodwill.

this post exists because of the price of being an open source developer, your solution is to demand more free work?

[boris]

I am not demanding anything, I am merely exploring if the "license rug pull" problem has a better solution. Redis paid dearly for it (justifiably or not) so if we can find a less costly option, wouldn't it be a good thing? I guess to put it another way, you are trying to change people's attitude towards open source while I am trying to see if there is a way around it.

[sabbaticaldev]

think about a solution that you (and other OSS users) have more work to do then not the maintainers

[pkaye]

Each of the previous versions the Redis released was an existing rug.

[perrygeo]

I've not experienced too much entitlement from users of my open source projects.

What I have experienced is the long tail of changes unrelated to the core competency of the library. I have some libraries where the fundamental logic and subject matter hasn't changed at all in a decade, yet I get a few dozen PRs a year to keep up with churn in the ecosystem. Sadly there are software ecosystems that don't value backwards compatibility at all - which causes massive pain for anyone who wants to build something that last in those ecosystems.

Running in place to keep up with your dependencies is not why I code! Maintaining these projects has become 99% busy work and I regret releasing them as open source.

[block_dagger]

I think if someone invests the time to learn and use (depend on) an OSS, they feel like they paid for it. Not only that, but they chose it over a competitor, thereby propping up the OSS author. Therefore, irrational or not, they feel entitled.

[GoblinSlayer]

There are two infinite things in this world: universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. Why people are surprised when somebody is dumb on the internet?