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.
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.