"That expectation does not entitle anybody to anything though."
This is true legally, but not otherwise (socially, practically)
"That is their decision. Without any contract or promise, there is no obligation to anybody."
Again, true legally, but IMHO a really silly position to take overall.
Imagine I provide free electricity to everyone in my town. I encourage everyone to use it. I do it all for free. I'm very careful to ensure the legal framework means i have no obligation, and everyone knows i have no obligations to them legally. They all take me up on it. All the other providers wither and die as a result. 15 years later, i decide to shut it all down on a whim because i want to move on to other things. The lights go out for the town everywhere.
Saying "i have no legal obligations" is true, but expecting people to not be pissed off, complain, and expect me to not do this is at best, naive.
Calling them entitled is even funnier. It's sort of irrelevant if they are entitled or not, after i put them in this position.
Legal obligation is not the only form of obligation, and not even the interesting ones most of the time.
More importantly - society has never survived on legal obligation alone.
I do not think you would enjoy living in a world where legal obligation is the only thing that mattered.
This is a bad analogy. We are talking about building a very simple Docker image.
It is more like you went around your neighborhood and turned peoples lights on in the evening, then stopped.
Sure, it’s a lost convenience, but people can easily choose to just… push the button themselves. Or pay somebody to continue doing it for them. Or get a timer.
It’s really not a big deal, and there are plenty of alternatives.
I think you are missing the point of legal vs societal obligations and your analogy is equally bad. Minio's sold you this free light bulb and they also freely offered the service to upgrade it to the newest version every time a new lightbulb was released. There are many light bulb brands out there, some paid, some free, most of them also offer the service to upgrade the lightbulb automatically, even the free ones.
Then Minio decided to disable the feature to upgrade the lightbulb automatically, the code to update it is still there, they just don't want to do it anymore. Conveniently there is a Minio+ enterprise plan that has this feature. But hey! they tell you that you can easily set up your own server to update your lightbulb automatically. And most enterprise clients or people who have Minio lightbulbs in their office will do that.
But for single enthusiasts who don't have a server because they are just running a Minio lightbulb in their shed it's a bad situation, because if they knew this from the beginning they would have gone with another free lightbulb that updated automatically.
In short: Minio has the legal right to do whatever they want, people using minio have the right to be pissed. It's an all around bad publicity stunt and if I was a Minio investor I would really wonder why they are trying to piss off their loyal user base for a quick buck.
Sounds like an opportunity for someone to fulfill their own "societal obligations" and contribute back to the community they've benefited (taken) from.
All those people lurking while no one gets the idea to "ok, then I'll do the job for all of you" thing seems like the societal contract has been broken long ago.
I agree, but it is always harder to have someone fill a void for a previously solved problem. I think they eventually will, but it's almost like maintenance programming vs. greenfield development; it's a harder task that's not much fun, plus the interpretation that you need to do a buch of work for something you previously already had. Ill-will towards MinIO is completely understandable.
> But for single enthusiasts who don't have a server because they are just running a Minio lightbulb in their shed it's a bad situation, because if they knew this from the beginning they would have gone with another free lightbulb that updated automatically.
What keeps those enthusiasts from setting up a scheduled GitHub Action (or whatever system they prefer to use) to build the image for themselves?
How much (amortized) effort are we actually talking about here? One minute per release?
> I think you are missing the point of legal vs societal obligations and your analogy is equally bad
There are a lot of paragraphs in this thread laying the groundwork for this subtle strawman, but neither you nor DannyBee are addressing the real opposing position. That's the one that says there is no legal obligation and there is no social obligation. You're both treating the latter as if agreement about its existence is a forgone conclusion not in dispute. But of course it's in dispute. It's the basis of the dispute.
The point is not about what Minio's legally required obligations are.
The point is, there is a community project, and Minio has revealed they are leaving the community. It's not illegal that they do so, any more than divorce is illegal, but it's concerning to anyone who views themselves as part of that community.
It raises a point that is it smart to join a new community that depends on the same people or organization.
Your persistent inability to comprehend this makes you look like a poor candidate for future professional collaboration. Maybe you are autistic, maybe just a shill, but it's not helping you.
OK - I live in a place that's snowy for a lot of the year. I shovel not only my sidewalk but my neighbours' several houses on both sides. People are really happy and grateful. Over the years Mr. Johnson the senior on a fixed pension next door loses mobility and is really appreciative I keep his walk clean. The couple next to him has a new baby and a clear sidewalk helps them load up all the accompanying gear into the car. My snowbird neighbours are happy that their walk is accessible when they're out of town. The dad who walks several kids to school is happy there's less snow to trudge through twice a day (in both directions). The mail carrier is less likely to slip and is grateful. Dog walkers and (crazy) winter joggers don't even consciously realize the improvement but still benefit.
Then I decide to stop. It doesn't really matter why, I wasn't getting paid or had not made any sort of formal agreement or promise, I just don't want to do it anymore. Now I shovel my sidewalk to the property line exactly and that's it. Hey, that's my legal obligation; I don't need to do any more! Mr. Johnson now has a lot more trouble getting out of his house; we see him a lot less. The baby is crying while new mom slips around trying to load up strollers and diaper bags and a car seat. The snowbirds just got fined by city bylaw for not clearing their walk. That dad's school trip is just a little longer, colder and unpleasant.
Hey, this isn't my fault! All those people took my effort for granted; I never promised to shovel their walks! They have no basis to judge me! But you better believe that this decision reduced their assessment that I'm a "good neighbour". Community is built mostly on implicit agreements, norms and conventions that are established through practice & conduct over time. You're arguing the right/wrong of this in the face of legal formalizations, while others are just saying it is a fact, not weighing the benefits and obligations.
We had some neighbors that used it throw a big Halloween celebration. They gave out drinks and snacks, dressed up in very elaborate costumes, setup movies on outdoor projectors, and do hayrides.
They didn’t do it last year. I was disappointed, but I’m not angry at them. I realize that they were spending a lot of time and energy and maybe they are just burned out.
I’m sure there are people who are angry and judge them. But those people are spoiled, entitled brats.
The distinction is that it is entirely fine to be disappointed. It’s not fine to get angry.
If people were depending on the party for very important things, and the neighbors encouraged it, and gave no warning, then it would be fine to get angry.
If you’re depending on the party for very important things you need to ask the neighbor how long they promise to keep throwing the party. You don’t just get to assume they’re going to do it literally forever and get mad when they stop.
In this analogy, you ask and they decline to promise anything concrete about the future, just saying that they currently have no plans to change. Their statement is the same any time they're asked, with no early warning via that method.
And, reminder, they keep encouraging people to use the party as an important foundation for their own efforts.
Does that help explain why a sudden stop is causing harm to people that weren't being greedy? At which point anger is not an inherently bratty behavior.
If someone says “we have no plans to stop hosting this party, but we can’t promise anything concrete” and you decide to depend on that party without a backup, you’re behaving like an idiot.
This analogy has been tortured to within an inch of its life though.
People could keep using the old docker images while they trivially build their own.
If you want to make the example fit it’s more like “hey we’re still having the party but we aren’t gonna to put up any new decorations. If you want to put up the new decorations we left our garage open, but you have to do it yourself“.
The docker users do generally have a backup. But being shoved onto a backup sucks, and with no warning it's even worse.
That level of promise is what you get with 95% or more of products and services. It's not like you can avoid it.
I understand the impulse to say that these expectations are unreasonable so nobody should get mad. But when companies cultivate those expectations on purpose, it stops being unreasonable to get mad.
>But when companies cultivate those expectations on purpose, it stops being unreasonable to get mad.
On the one hand I get that. But on the other hand, I see the exact same anger when it’s just some guy or a 2 person company that decides to stop doing some work for free.
If you limit your argument to it’s scummy for a company to offer something for free with the goal of creating a dependency that they can exploit by removing the free version and then offering a paid version, then I agree.
They can delay getting new versions for a few hours with no issue. But when they stop entirely it's a problem.
> On the one hand I get that. But on the other hand, I see the exact same anger when it’s just some guy or a 2 person company that decides to stop doing some work for free.
Well I'm not defending the anger in all cases. If it's that small they deserve a lot more slack. But they should still give a warning period and/or put in some effort to finding a new person from the community to put in charge.
> If you limit your argument to it’s scummy for a company to offer something for free with the goal of creating a dependency that they can exploit by removing the free version and then offering a paid version, then I agree.
Once the dependency exists, it's bad to cut it off without warning, even without an exploitative goal.
> They can delay getting new versions for a few hours with no issue. But when they stop entirely it's a problem.
If they can delay getting a new version for a few hours they can delay getting a new version for a few months.
> Once the dependency exists, it's bad to cut it off without warning, even without an exploitative goal.
It would be nice for them to do that, and it’s fine to be disappointed if they don’t, but anger is uncalled for unless it was malicious.
But ignoring that, it isn’t like they are shutting of a live service without warning. They’re just no longer offering an image. You can keep using the images that you had saved indefinitely. A warning wasn’t necessary.
Actually, in your analogy the reason why you stopped matters a great deal. For example, if you stopped shoveling snow because you are sick/injured, or because you are caring for a family member, nobody would think less of you as a neighbor. It's only if you stopped for a selfish reason that people would negatively judge your neighborliness. So to the extent that the analogy is instructive as to how we should think about MinIO's actions, we would have to judge the reason why they did this and decide whether that is worth thinking less of them.
There is an important point you are missing. Attitudes like this discourage people from doing nice things for others in general. Because you are saying that one nice deed or nice deeds for a period of time mean you are bound to have to do that deed forever for free.
This is the tragedy of the commons but not just for a field of grass, instead its for all human altruism. You really need to think about the consequences of this attitude because it doesn't lead where you seem to think it leads. In fact, it leads to exactly the opposite set of human behaviors.
PS The neighbors could easily just contract someone else to do the shoveling in the future and instead of being salty about having to pay, looking at it as how much money they saved in the past.
I mean, fair, but again, notice you're trying to actually, idk, understand the situation, use empathy.
I see GGP's comment attitude all too frequently on the internet ("nobody is entitled to anything") as the default. Which is such a nasty connotative strawman, it's kind of absurd. But hey, that's the internet for you.
Bad analogy, MinIO isn't a basic commodity required for life.
Maybe a car analogy (because they hardly work). It's like lending your car to someone everyday then stopping, then the person complains that they have no way to get around. But there is walking, biking, busses or buying your own car.
I don't see how "basic commodity required for life" is a necessary criteria for any ethical standards to apply at all. This is about trust, community and how to be a good project steward.
Then will you be volunteering your time and resources? Remember: once you start volunteering, you cannot stop, because you will "break everyone's trust and expectations" or even be "malicious". Happy volunteering.
This is exactly what happens when you volunteer. When you've had enough, or just want to spend your time in other ways, you're hounded to come back, to continue to help, and to varying degrees made to feel guilty because you decided to stop doing something that you had been offering for free.
I don't think this is a reason to never volunteer but you have to develop a thick skin, know where your lines are, and at some point politely but firmly say "no."
> Again, true legally, but IMHO a really silly position to take overall.
Is it? Let's take a look at the opposite scenario: What if MinIO never released any source code at all? They'd be just another 100% proprietary company like any other and would have never received any backlash for "pulling up the ladder behind them". So offering something for free and then rescinding later is treated worse than never offering anything for free at all!
What a way to entice companies to do open source guys, great job!
" So offering something for free and then rescinding later is treated worse than never offering anything for free at all!"
This is true plenty of times. In particular, if you violate social expectations/etc, you will often see this.
For example, here's an easy case:
I am about to go plant a bunch of trees.
A neighbor sees me going to do it, and offers to do it for me for free, because they like to do it.
I say cool. They can even say "just so you know, i'm not your contractor, blah blah blah" or whatever. Doesn't matter.
I go do something else with my time.
A week later, they did half the job, and quit, or they did the whole job and made a hash of it, or whatever.
1. It wouldn't make sense for me to expect them to fail or stop doing it or do it poorly just because it was free. Nor plan for them to fail.
2. Most people would still complain even though they paid nothing, and are arguably no worse off (depending on the options you pick) then when they started.
3. Most people would definitely feel like it was worse than doing nothing.
Now, in this example you could argue it's the poor quality/stopping halfway through that is causing this result, but you would IMHO see the same result even if they did a great job, but stopped after doing 90% of it, leaving me definitely no worse off, and probably much better off.
In the end, people's expectations are emotional and not simply rational.
Sticking with your analogy -- your townsfolk getting energy for free. As rational people they must include the possibility of free service being over at any time in their planning and act accordingly. Otherwise they're just freeloading.
Of course they are freeloading - and users often suck - but your latter doesn't follow.
It's fair in the singular case (IE if this is the only open source/free thing you use), but especially as you are dealing with more and more things like this (IE use lots of open source), it is totally irrational to expect them to plan for any of 50 open source projects they use to stop at any time.
It violates general good faith expectations. Just because someone is doing something for free doesn't mean you expect them to fail or stop - The cost is fairly orthogonal to most people's expectations. I don't expect any package in my linux distro to just stop existing or working at any time.
Sure, it would be sensible to plan for eventual failure of things you depend on, but it's not rational to expect people to plan for random failure of any of the things they depend on at any time, regardless of the cost of those things.
More to the point, it's not entitlement on their part to avoid sitting around waiting for the other shoe to drop all the time :)
The projects also often have the perspective of "it shouldn't be tha big a thing" but that's because they ignore they are not the only thing happening in their users world.
Did you read the comments on Github (linked by the title)?
So many commenters are just plain rude. They got free value for along time. Someone giving the free value decides to allocate their time otherwise. And the long-time receivers of the free value now cannot behave.
And you seem to make excuses for them...
It's just rude to behave like that after having enjoyed gifts for so long. They behave like spoiled children. Nothing to defend IMHO.
You're essentially saying that only users who contribute to OSS are worthy of attention and support. This is no different than saying that only commercial users, or those from specific countries, backgrounds, or industries are worthy of the same.
Those users who create issues, request features, and, yes, ask for support, are as valuable as those who contribute code or money. They're all part of the same community of users that help build a successful product. And they do it for free for you, because they're passionate about the product itself.
If you think otherwise then you should make your terms of service explicit by using a restrictive license and business model. OSS is not for you.
Yes, some people can be rude, demanding, and unworthy of your attention. But you make those boundaries clear, not treat all non-paying users as entitled children.
> If you think otherwise then you should make your terms of service explicit
FOSS licenses already do that: they shout at you in all-caps that the authors PROVIDE THE PROGRAM "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED.
Meanwhile the licenses don't say anything about communities.
For better or worse, OSI convinced everyone that "open source" is synonymous with using specific licenses that meet their definition. If that's the case, then how can it be a "fundamental misunderstanding of OSS" to strictly interpret OSS by the terms of the licenses, which don't mention any sort of "social contract", while they do include language explicitly contrary to such expectations of users?
> how can it be a "fundamental misunderstanding of OSS" to strictly interpret OSS by the terms of the licenses, which don't mention any sort of "social contract", while they do include language explicitly contrary to such expectations of users?
Because free and open-source software is more than a set of licenses approved by some governing body.
It is part of a social movement and ideology pursuing the open sharing of knowledge, and building communities around this where everyone can benefit, not just a select few. Software is one aspect of this, due to its roots in the hacker counterculture of the 1970s, but the core idea extends beyond it.
You can read more about this in many places. Bruce Perens specifically refers to a "social contract" in this early post[1] on the Debian mailing list. This is what is usually referred to as the "spirit" of open source, and is not strictly encoded in any official definition. The success of OSS depends on implicit mutual trust and respect, not on explicit rules and licenses.
Many open source projects have never opted-in to a social movement or ideological pursuit. Software meeting the OSI's definition can unarguably be called "open source" without any other implications of an ill-defined "spirit" which is completely subjective.
If I host a code repo on an otherwise static site, with no ability to contact the author or engage in a community, it is still widely considered "open source" if it uses an OSI-approved license.
Likewise if I host the same code repo on Github and disable issues and set the pull request template to say "All PRs will be closed and I will shout expletives at you for wasting my time", if it uses an OSI-approved license then it is still open source per the OSI's own definition.
This is true legally, but not otherwise (socially, practically)
"That is their decision. Without any contract or promise, there is no obligation to anybody."
Again, true legally, but IMHO a really silly position to take overall.
Imagine I provide free electricity to everyone in my town. I encourage everyone to use it. I do it all for free. I'm very careful to ensure the legal framework means i have no obligation, and everyone knows i have no obligations to them legally. They all take me up on it. All the other providers wither and die as a result. 15 years later, i decide to shut it all down on a whim because i want to move on to other things. The lights go out for the town everywhere.
Saying "i have no legal obligations" is true, but expecting people to not be pissed off, complain, and expect me to not do this is at best, naive.
Calling them entitled is even funnier. It's sort of irrelevant if they are entitled or not, after i put them in this position.
Legal obligation is not the only form of obligation, and not even the interesting ones most of the time.
More importantly - society has never survived on legal obligation alone.
I do not think you would enjoy living in a world where legal obligation is the only thing that mattered.