> Because for a long time, libraries have been advertised as building blocks that you can quickly integrate into your own application without having to understand in detail how the library works.
Libraries in general have been advertised this way, but it's not true for any given library, unless the library maintainers make that claim. In fact, it's quite common for people to release libraries with the exact opposite claim: They are not liable for anything that goes wrong, and they don't promise any support.
It is a bit offensive to have expectations from someone when the person makes it unambiguous how their SW can be used, and where their responsibility lies.
Now yes, it is true that many major, popular open source libraries do make a show of their libraries being reliable, and do provide support. And those that do tend to have more adoption. But even a number of those do say "Hey, we're putting in this effort, but are not promising bad things won't happen."
> Yes, free software devs can smugly repeat their stance of "it's a gift so don't complain, no guarantees about anything" - but if everyone took this serious, no one could use free software for anything critical, so the free software movement would be mostly dead.
This is transforming a continuum into a fairly worthless binary scenario. You're not going to have every library say "We won't provide support" just as you won't have every library say "We'll follow best security practices" - so why bring it up? It's trivial to show the latter would have likely killed the free SW movement too.
The reality is a continuum. And that is how the free software movement succeeds.
Libraries in general have been advertised this way, but it's not true for any given library, unless the library maintainers make that claim. In fact, it's quite common for people to release libraries with the exact opposite claim: They are not liable for anything that goes wrong, and they don't promise any support.
It is a bit offensive to have expectations from someone when the person makes it unambiguous how their SW can be used, and where their responsibility lies.
Now yes, it is true that many major, popular open source libraries do make a show of their libraries being reliable, and do provide support. And those that do tend to have more adoption. But even a number of those do say "Hey, we're putting in this effort, but are not promising bad things won't happen."
> Yes, free software devs can smugly repeat their stance of "it's a gift so don't complain, no guarantees about anything" - but if everyone took this serious, no one could use free software for anything critical, so the free software movement would be mostly dead.
This is transforming a continuum into a fairly worthless binary scenario. You're not going to have every library say "We won't provide support" just as you won't have every library say "We'll follow best security practices" - so why bring it up? It's trivial to show the latter would have likely killed the free SW movement too.
The reality is a continuum. And that is how the free software movement succeeds.