[msteffen]

In support of your point, after Hashicorp relicensed Terraform (thereby killing, or at least squeezing, a lot of Terraform consultancies who had collectively contributed a massive amount to Terraform and prompting the creation of OpenTofu), Oxide and Friends spent several episodes discussing what was reasonable for open source maintainers to do.

They had a great discussion with Kelsey Hightower about it[^1], and his answer (which I liked a lot) was basically just that maintainers’ only real obligation was to be transparent about governance. If you want to be a dictator and ignore bugs and contributions that aren’t personally compelling to you, that’s fine—but please just put that in the repo. That way, people who are trying to build a business on open source work and want customers, or to build trust with users for any other reason, can distinguish themselves from maintainers that don’t care (as is their right). Otherwise the reputation of Open Source as a whole suffers.

[^1]: The whole episode is good but here’s the part where Kelsey argues that people just need to be transparent: https://youtu.be/13ctYOu8TsA?si=cI8TwHX6tAaCwH6o&t=1320