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)
Except this is a bit silly. So, for example, rsync does have an alternative already on the market; it’s called openrsync, but I tried to just “s/rsync/openrsync/“ (in a script) and it is not a 1:1 replacement. And it’s not even close.
Contributing requires the project maintainer to not be a dick, but with rsync, people have probably been “oh, he’s been doing so good as they are.”
I might fork rsync (to version freeze) before the AI adds, but it complicates system administration. System administration is easiest using the package management systems. I, personally, believe there are like four Linux versions: pacman, dnf/yum, aptitude, and source.
Maybe it’s silly to make your own fork, but unless someone else does it and you opt for their alternative, those are your options.
Complaining about how the dev decides to maintain his own project that he does for free is not one of them.
He’s been maintaining critical infrastructure for decades. Maybe if you make him a billionaire then he’ll have to run his project however you demand, but as long as this is just a passion project of his, it’s no one else’s business. They can submit bug reports, they can contribute PRs, but cussing him out because you don’t like how he manages his own project is just dumb.