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 can’t think of a single analogous action in providing software for use for free aside from injecting malware, which I’m pretty sure is criminal? No?
I wouldn’t call “not intentionally being malicious” a responsibility anymore than following any laws is a real responsibility… responsibility here implies an active duty to do something, not really to not commit crimes. I really can’t think of any active responsibility any dev has for software they’ve put out there. It could literally cause harm to some hardware and they still really wouldn’t have a responsibility for anything as long as it isn’t (in fact that’s for good reason a common disclaimer for things that tweak hardware).
What did you have in mind as responsibilities a dev has?