> Well to be fair, if you release something to the public you do have a certain responsibility. At least to provide a running configuration without the documentation being behind a payment.
If it's free, you have zero responsibility. People can choose to use it or not, I don't think you even have a responsibility to keep it running.
If you have a hundred thousand users and you decide tomorrow to just yank it from existence, that's absolutely fine too.
It's free, no one forces you to use, don't expect anything. The maintainer might get bored with it, delete it, accidentally break it, or change it just for shits and giggles to fuck with people.
This is very silly and I urge you to rethink this position. The software is free, it contains a very explicit warranty disclaimer, and the implicit social contract is that nobody owes anyone anything. There is no fraud here.
If you download the code I posted to my GitHub account and try to do something with it, and it doesn’t work or you don’t understand it or I didn’t bother writing docs, that is in fact very much on you.
Perhaps my software project has lots of docs and I’m super helpful to users, and it is therefore more likely to be popular, or perhaps it does not have those properties and will stay obscure, but either way it is your job to decide what free software to use, not mine to make it up to your standards.
I have never seen paywalled OSS docs and it seems like a silly idea, but that doesn’t make it fraudulent or even bad. It just makes it perhaps inadvisable to use. Which again is on you.
LandR|3 years ago
If it's free, you have zero responsibility. People can choose to use it or not, I don't think you even have a responsibility to keep it running.
If you have a hundred thousand users and you decide tomorrow to just yank it from existence, that's absolutely fine too.
It's free, no one forces you to use, don't expect anything. The maintainer might get bored with it, delete it, accidentally break it, or change it just for shits and giggles to fuck with people.
It's fine. It's free.
kortilla|3 years ago
Take some responsibility.
icambron|3 years ago
If you download the code I posted to my GitHub account and try to do something with it, and it doesn’t work or you don’t understand it or I didn’t bother writing docs, that is in fact very much on you.
Perhaps my software project has lots of docs and I’m super helpful to users, and it is therefore more likely to be popular, or perhaps it does not have those properties and will stay obscure, but either way it is your job to decide what free software to use, not mine to make it up to your standards.
I have never seen paywalled OSS docs and it seems like a silly idea, but that doesn’t make it fraudulent or even bad. It just makes it perhaps inadvisable to use. Which again is on you.