I still really don’t understand what is so entitled about asking for a level of base empathy and care from maintainers.
People now yell at you that their only obligation is whatever is spelled out in the license they attached to the code. I think this is the same place where the logic of Code = Law comes from. People who think that you can encode the legal/judicial system into a set of axioms. This is not how the law works nor is it how it is taught and asserting this is a fundamental misunderstanding of human systems. It is incredibly destructive when people start applying maths as ground rules for human interaction. People do not live in black/white. We live in grey.
I am certainly not old enough to have experienced it, but I would venture a guess that the reason the BSD/MIT licenses originally existed was so that the universities had a CYA clause. I think you can see this erosion from a group of people sharing software in academic and hobbyist circles into weird legal absolutism as software becomes more of a business. For instance, Bill Gates’ famous letter to hobbyists or the PKZIP fiasco.
> I still really don’t understand what is so entitled about asking for a level of base empathy and care from maintainers.
> People now yell at you that their only obligation is whatever is spelled out in the license they attached to the code.
Let’s turn your implied question around: if a person wants to share code without any expectation of care and maintenance, what should they do? Is the entire concept bogus, and the developer should just keep the code to themselves forever? Or put a “DO NOT USE FOR YOUR BILLION DOLLAR COMPANY” in a README? What communication other than the license could reasonably be provided?
I think the person you’re responding to made a pretty good point that open-source is sometimes the passion of an unpaid 1-person “team” and sometimes the product of a VC-funded attempt to buy goodwill. The idea that asking for more from maintainers is entitled is clearly suitable for the former case but not the latter. Now that Bun has been bought out perhaps they are more deserving of scrutiny.
I'm not arguing against a base level of empathy and care for maintainers.
I'm arguing FOR a base level of empathy and care FROM maintainers WHO CHOOSE to build for-profit products in the open, and that empathy for all parties should be the base expectation from a healthy community, rather than the narcissistic view of "nobody owes their communities anything, regardless of context".
The narssisist view leads to the behaviour of Minio, Bambu, etc becoming an accepted norm; to the abuse, exploitation, and deterioration of open source communities by for-profit orgs.