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Comment by vouaobrasil | Hacker News Reader

I agree with this article entirely, except I have one counterpoint that should be more emphasized: open source programmers and maintainers should be more explicit and clear that the product can be discontinued, have problems, or just stop working with any updates beyond saying it in the license. Because otherwise normal people will have some ambiguity and have the mistaken idea that there is some social contract, however slight, that what you are offering has some promise of functioning.

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I don’t get it. The document setting out this fact is the license, which also tells them they’re allowed to use it at all. The MIT license is short and simple and very explicit about lack warranty.

If we were to say “no one reads the license; it’s just boilerplate!” and add it elsewhere — say the bottom of the readme or in another file like disclaimer.md — it would quickly just become other, different boilerplate that no one reads.

You can’t solve the problem of understanding norms by writing copy. I’m resigned to everyone learning the hard way.

> You can’t solve the problem of understanding norms by writing copy

You can mitigate the problem by adding a short summation before or in between something they're likely to read.

The social contract arises from social relations. Ie: the dynamic between maintainer and contributors. It doesn't exist just because stuck something on GitHub with an MIT license.

This is why there's no conflict between the people who are aggrieved at OSS maintainers suddenly closing their software, and the people who say "it says no warranty right there in the license".

The default position is that there's no social contract. It's only through interacting with and building a community does a social contract (and associated expectations) arise. It's not codified in the license.

I always want to know what is the "intention" of the author/maintainer before I invest time in an open source project I want to use. I would love to see that with big bold letters at the top of each README.

And when the "intention" changes after you invested a few years/$ thousands into using the project, then ... ?

Part of the game I guess. At least you get a heads up and you can prioritize moving away from it or forking it.

then you fork it and invest more. Hopefully you will keep the same or better standards you demanded with your own budget

It is crystal clear by the fact that the users didn't pay anything for it.

also known as due diligence. that’s the users of open source burden, not the developers

The thing is, I am not talking about the burden or morality. Just what will happen.

not will, that happens all the time. You are stating the obvious. The not so obvious part isis to do the work in place of expecting anything for granted.

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