I saw an issue today on a fairly popular project (better-auth, see the link to the issue attached). No repro, no context, just a wall of caps and profanity ending in “fuck you”. The maintainers ship this for free. People run production businesses on top of it, for free. And the thanks is someone raging into a text box because a minor bump cost them an afternoon.
I maintain and contribute to a few projects myself, so this hits a nerve a bit. Something people don’t see from the outside: it’s not enough to know how to build the thing. You also have to know how to defuse a thread where someone’s insulting you and not fire back, even though most of us aren’t paid for any of it, let alone the work of staying civil while being told to get fucked.
I’m not pretending breaking changes don’t cause real pain (that’s what the issue is about). But I keep coming back to a boundary question: if you’re not paying for it, do you actually get to demand anything? (Obviously yes, but we still need some boundaries)
I don’t think it’s valid to simultaneously present open-source as a legitimate alternative for paid software, while also saying you can’t have expectations of the software or trust its guarantees (ie. semver) because it’s just a volunteer project. If you’re presenting your OSS in the serious space of choices for its niche, it will (and should be!) held to a high standard. If it can’t be, then don’t present it as a real alternative. I’ve noticed this (mostly-unintentional) conflation between serious OSS competitors and hobby projects in almost every discussion on this topic I’ve seen.
The thing that annoys me is that one of the big strengths of open source is that anyone can help make it better, which SHOULD allow it to be a legitimate alternative provided it’s popular enough.
But for some reason both maintainers and users/contributors tend to find it really fucking difficult to be sensible about things, with users/contributors being needlessly rude (among other problems) and maintainers not giving a shit about the quality of their projects.
Like… it’s totally understandable and okay for projects to be flawed since the people making it are mere mortal humans, but we should neither be responding to this with “ugh write better code you lazy scrub!” nor “fuck you i write this for free you don’t get to demand anything”.
We should respond to it with “hey {xyz} could use some improvement” and “hm yeah that’s true, i can’t be arsed to implement it but anyone who wants to open a PR will carry the favour of the heavens”.
It’s not rocket science.
Yup