

Moral obligations of Free Software authors? - alexkay
http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1463-moral-obligations-of-free-software-authors

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patio11
I find "That is a wonderful idea. You can either clone the repository and make
it yourself or, in the alternative, pay my consulting rate and I'll do it for
you." solves 99% of my problems with the OSS entitlement mentality.

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m0nty
Free == Freedom to walk away from maintaining the damn thing. If other people
can't be bothered to contribute, that's tough. A few dollars in the tip jar
hardly counts, given what most coders could charge for their time and
expertise.

I've given up writing free software since too many people want a free ride.
Even after telling them "I have no interest in helping you fix your Linux
installation on the way to making the software work", or "It wasn't designed
to run with sqlite, only MySQL, and I have no time to change that", people
keep keep keep coming back and demanding more time. "Which part of 'no' did
you not understand?"

If an ecosystem doesn't develop around your software, if you have no other
maintainers, and if you have a life, you should probably just leave it.

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hammerdr
No.

E.g. The ludicrous bashing of Gruber for not maintaining Markdown for the
purposes of StackOverflow by Atwood.

[http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/12/responsible-open-
so...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/12/responsible-open-source-code-
parenting.html)

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lsc
eh, if the users don't want to maintain it, and they don't want to pay you to
maintain it, it won't get maintained. The same is true (only moreso) for
commercial software.

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jsz0
It's an interesting question. Probably falls under the _"teach a man to
fish..."_ adage nicely. If you provide a functional tool that has reached the
goals you set for it where's the obligation? Exotic features that are outside
of your goals simply do not benefit your interests in the project. Someone has
to make it worth your time and effort to continue otherwise you've provided a
good platform that seems to be well documented and capable of being taken over
by another interested party. If that never happens then you're probably right
that the project is finished. Maybe find similar active projects to steer your
users towards.

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tzs
I'd say the most important moral obligation of a free software author is to
not waste people's time. The primary way to not waste people's time is to be
accurate about claims you make regarding your software.

For instance, if your site says that your software does X, and points to a
"Howto do X" document you wrote--and that document is actually for an earlier
version of the software and fundamentally won't work with the current version,
and it won't be apparent that its fundamentally broken until after I've spend
several hours going through the tricky steps of the Howto document--then you
have wasted my time.

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jkahn
I think this is pretty simple. Either they pay, or you have no obligation.

