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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. kragen+YP1[view] [source] 2024-06-30 06:32:36
>>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.

if you measure the solubilities of some salts and publish them, and your data is widely used and people rely on it, do you therefore have an obligation to repeat your experiments to make them more precise and correct erroneous measurements, and to extend them to more salts? i think not; i do think you have some ethical obligations, but they are limited to admitting that you were wrong, and not taking credit for others' work

if the users of your work start talking to each other and helping each other, they might become a community, but that still doesn't impose an obligation on you to do more work for them. to my way of thinking, you're the person in that situation with the least ethical obligations

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