Why would I need to? Nobody volunteered. In the analogy, you found something on a shelf somewhere and decided to depend on it. The person who put it on the shelf never agreed to support you in that endeavor.
Are different states. 'Maintenance' is not work-free or effortless, so the second sentence is explicitly volunteering to do some non-zero amount of work, right?
I don't see how it can be read any other way, you either have to argue that maintenance isn't work, or that "I am the maintainer" is not volunteering oneself into the role of doing that work.
You understand this is the opposite of your example before right?
It's like a business asking for volunteers, you saying you will, then the business demanding that you turn up when it suits them and you not being allowed to say "no"
If I have a garden in my yard and I say “I am the gardener of this garden”, what commitment have I made to you, a third party who just happened to be within earshot, about how much time I will spend working on the garden?
We're not talking about someone who "just happens to be within earshot" of something that is inside your private garden and not open to the public.
If you put a note on the public noticeboard saying "I have planted some things in this area of the public commons and I am the maintainer them" can you defend the idea that you are not voluntarily offering to maintain something?
Go on then, which part of my earlier post do you disagree with, specifically?
1. The difference between ‘abandoned’ and ‘maintained’ is that ‘maintained’ is bounded at the lower end to a greater-than-zero amount of maintenance work. Not a specific amount but necessarily >0. (Without that, “maintained” and “abandoned” become the same thing and that’s absurd).
2. “I am the maintainer” can be a voluntary statement, it’s not compelled (e.g. by a gun to the head).
3. The role of ‘maintainer’ is ‘doing that >0 amount of maintenance work’.
?
By the time we’re arguing how much maintenance, you’re agreeing with my position. In the case of your garden, if I saw it on fire I would think it reasonable to contact you about the fire given you are the gardener. I wouldn’t contact someone who was not the gardener.
Oh, you asked me if I disagreed with your point about gardens.
That one is pretty obvious because community gardens that want to enforce a floor on amount of maintenance include that in rules that you have to agree to before they give you some of their space.
I checked the whole terms of service for GitHub and they don’t have anything about how much work I have to do on a repo once I publish it for it to stay mine.
If you’re asking me which of those statements I disagree with, 1 and 3.
And
“This is maintained and I am the maintainer”
Are different states. 'Maintenance' is not work-free or effortless, so the second sentence is explicitly volunteering to do some non-zero amount of work, right?
I don't see how it can be read any other way, you either have to argue that maintenance isn't work, or that "I am the maintainer" is not volunteering oneself into the role of doing that work.