3 comments

  • arjie7 minutes ago
    Recently, I&#x27;ve noticed a certain idea a lot I didn&#x27;t see before: that if you make something a lot of people like, you have a responsibility to them. In the real world, this happens if someone has planted a tree in their garden and people like how it looks, then when they want to cut it down, &quot;the community&quot; would like an opinion.<p>Likewise, in the open-source world, after a certain number of things start depending on your work, people often say it &quot;should be considered a public good&quot; - which is particularly confusing because public good seems something entirely different from its other well-known definition.<p>I think this whole idea of &quot;if you make something nice that other people like, you are obligated to serve people forever&quot; is totally bogus. I (well Claude+Codex) write a lot of LLM code these days and many of the base libraries are open source. If I had to write ratatui it would take a long time. But if someone decided to bully the ratatui maintainer I wouldn&#x27;t ever know. And there&#x27;s no way to un-bully someone anyway.
  • avaer47 minutes ago
    This triggers me hard.<p>&gt; One source of toxic behavior is entitled users.<p>It&#x27;s hard to explain to people how insane things can get when you give away your work and time for free, in the hope that it will benefit people. Some things I&#x27;ve experienced:<p><pre><code> - People yelling at me in DM&#x27;s when I didn&#x27;t edit a podcast for community meetups in time - Alcoholics joining in on FOSS meetups because they wanted attention - People in the community getting spammed with crypto scams impersonating me that I had to answer to - My work being whitelabeled and sold to investors to raise money to the extent people accuse me of stealing from others - Smear campaigns making their way to my employer when I decided not to work on a particular open source project anymore - I gave away hardware to community members; the reward was tech support requests - Suicidal community members using me as a therapist (they claim I &quot;saved their life&quot;), followed by taking private (non FOSS) source code and giving it to to my competitors to advance their own tech careers </code></pre> This is just scratching the surface of the things I&#x27;ve had to deal with in my open source work. I&#x27;ve learned to draw much stricter boundaries.<p>If you are going to get into open source communities you should go in with a plan for how you&#x27;re going to deal with these kinds of things when they happen to you.
    • RossBencina0 minutes ago
      [delayed]
    • rglover30 minutes ago
      Well this just made me feel a whole lot better (similar experience, though not as hardcore). Good lord.
  • corvad44 minutes ago
    XZ Utils was a big example of this, the poor maintainer had to put up with toxic users and it led to supply chain compromise after a while.