> The only people entitled to say how open source 'ought' to work are people who run projects, and the scope of their entitlement extends only to their own projects.
If this is the case, why open source or publish it in the first place? If you want people to read the code, but not interact with you, why not write that into the license? Why not use something like CC-SA?
> As a user of something open source you are not thereby entitled to anything at all. You are not entitled to contribute. You are not entitled to features. You are not entitled to the attention of others. You are not entitled to having value attached to your complaints. You are not entitled to this explanation.
Looking at that last sentence, then, why not STFU, Mr. Hickey? Assuming the "users" are Clojure programmers, if they're entitled merely to nil, why bother with this angsty rant?
> Open source is a licensing and delivery mechanism, period. It means you get the source for software and the right to use and modify it. All social impositions associated with it, including the idea of 'community-driven-development' are part of a recently-invented mythology with little basis in how things actually work, a mythology that embodies, cult-like, both a lack of support for diversity in the ways things can work and a pervasive sense of communal entitlement.
This is completely wrong. The reason we have open source in the first place is years long, decades long, determined community effort. Mr. Hickey is not entitled to change the definition of F/OSS.
Because there's a difference between 'can' and 'must'. It's great when people use my OSS work, give feedback, and even file bugs. What's not great is when people adopt the position that they're entitled to a fix right now (or ever), or that they're entitled to new features or design consideration for their minority use case. In summary, strawmanning someone else's argument is bad, and you should feel bad.
> [W]hy bother with this angsty rant?
Managing large OSS projects is about doing things at scale, like answering a question exhaustively once, in one place, so you can refer back to it instead of having to explain variations of it repeatedly, ad infinitum. As far as 'angsty', maybe start with a little humility: check your own biases before reading an attitude into someone else's message.
> This is completely wrong.
Nope, you are. Both in the technical/legal sense and the historical sense. Recommended reading: The Cathedral and the Bazaar.
Please keep nasty internet tropes like that one way, far away from Hacker News. If you'd review the guidelines and follow them from now on, we'd appreciate it.