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Comment by nextlevelwizard | Hacker News Reader

You present no argument at all. FOSS is FOSS. Creator or current maintainer owes you and other users exactly nothing. They are putting their stuff up for you to use if you see value in it. You can report bugs and make feature requests, but no one is under any obligation to even read your bug reports or feature requests. If you want your specific thing fixed right now then do it yourself.

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Grandparent comment is “I maintain a very popular piece of FOSS software as my full time job”; FOSS means libre not necessarily gratis, it could still be paid for, with paying customers or employer-users in this case and owe them a lot.

That's correct, but misses the point. If you are paid for FOSS work then whoever pays you can expect you to do certain things. But that's the "get paid" part, not the "FOSS" part. It would be the same with paid work on proprietary software.

Yes it would be the same with paid work on proprietary software, which is why the comment I was replying to "FOSS is FOSS. Creator or current maintainer owes you and other users exactly nothing." is a non-sequitur, it doesn't hold up. Whether you have the source code and rights to redistribute it is orthogonal to whether the creator or current owner has a contract with you and "owes" you anything.

Having access to the source doesn't automatically mean the owner/maintainer owes you nothing. I think the comment is promoting only the "FOSS == gratis" side of getting things for free ($0) and not considering the original "FOSS == insight and rights, even if paid for" side of things.

Even if you pay for piece of software that does not entitle you any say on the direction the software is going or priority on your bug reports or feature requests. There can be explicit contract where you are funding specific feature, but just donating to a project does not entitle you to anything. You can stop using the software if it does not provide you any use. That is the only thing you are entitled to.

I never said "payment ENTITLES you to support", I said having access to the source does NOT mean NO entitlement to support, one does not control the other either way because access to the source and paid support contracts are separate things.

> "there can be explicit contract where you are funding specific feature"

Yes, I said as much when I said you can have a contract for support and also have FOSS software. Here, you are downvoting me and agreeing with me. There can be a explicit contract where you have the source source and also are entitled to some development that you're paying for.

> "You can stop using the software if it does not provide you any use. That is the only thing you are entitled to."

NO, here you are changing your mind again and narrowing it back down to "it was free so you have no rights". You cannot make the judgement that because someone has open source software, they didn't pay for it, and you cannot make the judgement that if they have open source software, they are not entitled to anything. The three are DIFFERENT things. The original point of FOSS was to avoid vendor lockin, not to get free downloads from Github.

In case it isn't extremely clear, downloading a free and foss tool from Github does not entitle you to feature requests or support. Donating to it does not either. Saying "every FOSS user has no entitlement to support or feature requests because the code is FOSS" is incorrect, and a bad idea for the programming/tech industry to be spreading, partly because a lot of developers would benefit from spreading the idea of paid FOSS because they want to work on it and get paid, and partly because users would benefit from the increase in paying for software and also getting the source as part of that, including whatever entitlement to support paying would have got them normally.

Sure, but that doesn’t mean I have to view it as an acceptable choice if a maintainer leverages a large user base for notoriety and then fails to prioritize that user base’s needs. They can do that, and I can express frustration that it’s an unacceptably poor failure if they do, in more ways than just declining to use their software.

I think there's a big assumption that maintainer does the work to gain notoriety. Many of them (myself included) do it completely anonymously. Many others have a traceable identity but still they may be motivated by other things.

If it appears on a resume, it’s done for notoriety. If it’s fully anonymous and never appears on a resume, then I concede you are right in that case, but I think that’s an extreme minority of cases among the types of projects the thread is discussing.

> If it appears on a resume, it’s done for notoriety.

There might be such people, but I doubt such projects would be very successful or notorious. Being able to put something on CV does not provide that long lasting gratification needed to develop/maintain software in the long run. If it's about your CV only, then there are probably more effective ways to achieve better returns.

(In my case I don't put my F/OSS on my CV and I don't think I'm "extreme minority")

As a hiring manager, a large fraction (easily greater than 50%) of resumes that I see do list OSS projects and contributions as accomplishments and technical experience.

Maybe I just see an unusual slice of the OSS maintainer world, but it’s very common.

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