It's good to bring disagreements to surface [LWN.net]

It's good to bring disagreements to surface

Posted Mar 3, 2026 17:36 UTC (Tue) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75)
In reply to: It's good to bring disagreements to surface by sionescu
Parent article: The exploitation paradox in open source

As others have said, I think you're reading a bit too much into this. There's a big step between participating in governance and calling the shots. Developers really should be listening to their users and, within reason, working to give them what they want. That doesn't mean developers need to be at the beck and call of every individual user- if nothing else, different individual users might have mutually exclusive requests- but when a large subset of the userbase is saying they do or don't want something, smart developers listen.

I think this gets to the issue of legal versus ethical obligations. FOSS developers have basically no legal obligations to their users. They can abandon the project, add features nobody asked for, or deprecate features people depend on, all while remaining within their legal rights. But once a project has dedicated users, the developers have an ethical obligation not to mistreat them. That means they should listen to what their users do and don't want and take those desires into account. If they're going to abandon a project, they should let users know and take reasonable steps to pass find a replacement. Respect for the users can make the difference between a mediocre project and a great one.

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It's good to bring disagreements to surface

Posted Mar 3, 2026 17:49 UTC (Tue) by sionescu (subscriber, #59410) [Link] (1 responses)

> but when a large subset of the userbase is saying they do or don't want something, smart developers listen

I don't agree. It might be those developers who want to operate the project as a semi-commercial endeavour might do that, but still, all developers have all the right to say "NO" to requests from the so-called "community": from the Sqlite developers (God bless them), to individual developers that have no interest in turning a project, albeit a popular one, into a broad mission or to the Clojure team who want to keep the language focused and reject features they consider useless to that mission.

> But once a project has dedicated users, the developers have an ethical obligation not to mistreat them.

Abandoning without advance notice, or without a succession plan is not mistreatment. The developers own the project, and as such they have the right to "abusus" of their property. They're already generous enough to bestow "usus and fructus" on the users.

It's good to bring disagreements to surface

Posted Mar 4, 2026 10:39 UTC (Wed) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link]

I would say if there is any moral obligation at all for developers then it is (if able of course, sudden accidents happen) to keep some sort of short notice of their intentions for the project (actively maintained for general consumption, actively maintained but basically only for their own use cases, research/learning project, abandoned,...) somewhere at the top of the README or some similar location. Just to save everyone the hassle of mismatches in expectations.