“I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”

I don't know if it's just me, but if you read the forums and bug reports related to open source projects, it feels like programmers today are a really entitled lot.

The tone that people take when filing bug reports for what is basically free software is reprehensible. People are doing work for FREE to benefit you, and you take a tone with them like you are a prince and they are your royal goblet holders? Who taught these human beings their manners?

I totally understand the frustration when you write a large system in Python and then the Python committee makes a breaking change that makes your life very difficult. However, you didn't pay for Python! These sorts of changes should be expected, and if you didn't expect it, you are the fool. And in any case, you aren't paying these people a cent, so speak politely to them. You are basically a charity case from their perspective.

I think what you're saying is true in the case of someone just throwing up some code they wrote online without any plan of supporting or developing it further.

But once you call it an open-source project, and you have docs and a roadmap and an issues page and stuff, you're making an implicit contract with people who use it that it will do a reasonable job of solving the problem it claims to solve. The user is choosing to use it over other alternatives and investing time learning and integrating it, so it doesn't seem at all unreasonable to me for them to be frustrated when they realize that due to some bug or limitation it doesn't actually solve the problem for them that it claims to.

As an analogy, if you give someone free food and it makes them sick, are they justified in getting mad at you? I think most people would say yes. IANAL but I'd imagine that if you got food poisoning from Ben & Jerry's free cone day due to negligent sanitation practices or something, you could probably sue the company just like if you had paid for it.

Or, if a member of some sort of volunteer community board is doing a bad job, people will complain about it. An open source maintainer is basically in the same position.

Of course, that's no excuse for being rude to them, but you also shouldn't be rude if you paid for something and it doesn't work. I'm not saying we shouldn't do anything to reduce hostility towards maintainers when it happens. But it's not true, in open source software or anywhere else, that just because something is free there are automatically no expectations around it.

I think theres absolutely zero implicit contract that implies that open source software maintainers owe ANYone ANYthing at ANYtime.

That's the reason it's open source because everyone can fix it, all an open source maintainer owes you is a P.R. review.

Therefore if an open source project maintainer is giving you their time and patience then you better be extra polite and grateful to them.

If Ben and Jerrys left a bunch of ice cream on the sidewalk and a bunch of people ate it and got sick then there would be zero liability on Ben and Jerrys.

> If Ben and Jerrys left a bunch of ice cream on the sidewalk and a bunch of people ate it and got sick then there would be zero liability on Ben and Jerrys.

Citation? That doesn't seem right, based on my anecdotal knowledge that restaurants take care to throw leftovers into a garbage bin rather than leave them out somewhere where someone could eat them and expose the business to liability.

I looked up this claim myself. In 1996, President Clinton signed the Good Samaritan Food Donation Act into law to limit liability for those who donate food. [1] The majority of restaurants still discard leftover food due to concerns over liability, though. [2] Clearly, liability was a real issue at some point in the past. I don't know enough about the current law to know how easy it is to take advantage of the new protections; I can understand why people are still concerned.

In summary, liability issues vary by country and are not clear-cut. As an analogy for this open-source situation, they don't clarify matters.

[1] https://digitalcommons.law.seattleu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?...

[2] https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/restaurants-that-dont-d...

In your analogy you're citing a business. Then if you open source something you wrote, are you claiming you are a business? No matter how un/business-like the open source claim may be: has any money changed ownership between the parties in the course of the person writing and maintaining software vs the person using that software?

If no business transaction has been formalized then why should either party be liable? Indeed, if a person is not permitted to simply say "this is the software I am using" without also becoming liable for problems caused when other people use or look at that software? I don't think it is right to allow a person to be liable just for the speech of their software.

Fortunately, a lot of open source software is known to be open source because of a license file. Many open source licenses declare no liability or warranty of any kind. In that case, would not any liability claimed would be forfeit? Otherwise they would have been using the software in breach of its declared intended purpose at the point of time being talked about.