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[return to "Open source is neither a community nor a democracy"]
1. Grimet+ad[view] [source] 2024-06-29 10:37:35
>>levlaz+(OP)
On the one side: Yes, truer words have never been spoken. You want a new feature added? Want to talk about how the project should change directions? Want to impose new rules? Do a little power play? Yeah, start working on the project, implementing changes/features you want to see.

On the other side: No. When you provide software that is widely used and that people rely on, you automatically created a community where fixing bugs is an obligation. Your software has become a corner stone in other people’s software stack/life and so those people and their issues with your software have become your problem, too. If you want it or not.

Hiding behind open source and not fixing bugs has become a deal breaker so many times over the last few decades, that I stopped counting. Not everybody knows the language needed to fix a bug and not everybody understands the dependencies within a project to being able to fix a bug. So “fixing” one bug can create ten new ones and make things much worse.

Not to mention what happens when you attempt to fix the bug but the source is not accepted upstream because it’s bad, which is understandable, but still leaves you with an upstream version of the software and your patched version that fixes said bug.

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2. yawara+eM1[view] [source] 2024-06-30 05:03:55
>>Grimet+ad
You are completely wrong, and this really couldn't get any simpler. Just look at the license of the software you are using. You agreed to this license when you used the software. It says something similar to:

> THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

It's not even as if this was buried under mountains of legalese. OSS licenses are usually quite simple. You have absolutely no excuse for not understanding that the software provider has zero obligation to you. All you had to do was read a few paragraphs.

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