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.
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.