zlacker

>>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.

>>Grimet+ad
> When you provide software that is widely used and that people rely on, you automatically created a community where fixing bugs is an obligation.

No, you don't. Some open source producers might choose to take on that extra burden, but giving your software away for free cannot automatically create such a burden, no matter how many people use it. The only recourse you have as a user if you don't like that deal is to not use the software. You don't have the right to demand more free work from someone who already provided you with free work.

>>pdonis+nK1
How often it is that someone just gives software for free?

I mean usually you have to promote software and by promoting you create an obligation - no one is going to use it if you drop some piece of code on GH and in reader you will write „I don’t care about it take it or leave it”.

You have to actively promote and show that you care to create „widely used software”. Promoting by showing that you care creates the obligation. Of course obligation is not entitling people to tell you what to do - but to keep level of decency like fixing glaring security flaws.

>>ozim+aP1
First, most users are indeed finding open source software by searching around by keyword and assessing top hits on their own. Most developers don't have a sense of how to promote their project effectively if they wanted to. Marketing of any sort only plays a role in the most high profile projects, many of which are commercially sponsored.

Second, even where a developer puts some legwork into letting the world know what they've shared, that effort is within the context of the project's license terms which almost universally make it explicit and clear that they profer no such obligation.

Tweeting "I made this thing, check it out!" does not soemhow absolve the user from reading the license on that thing and understanding that no promises are made.