The someone is often me. Do you think I’m not doing enough OSS? I’m arguing to my fellow OSS contributors to be more aware of downstream costs. I get that you probably don’t know about my contributions because I don’t know about yours, but I’ve put O(100k) or so lines into OSS.
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Replying to @posco
Not sure what that has to do with anything... You could work full time on open source for 40 years and that wouldn't obligate any other OSS maintainer to keep maintaining their thing for you.
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Replying to @shlevy
Where did I say anyone was obligated? I said we should account for a cost. You maybe think we shouldn’t account for those costs?
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Replying to @posco
What if you got an amazing job offer, and everyone at your current place admonished you to account for the costs your leaving would put on the company in considering the decision? They wouldn't be *wrong* to say that you leaving has an impact, but the phrasing matters...
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this is a pretty disingenuous argument.
@posco isn't compelling or pressuring anyone to do more free work. He's discussing how to be a better OSS maintainer. That includes the reasonable assumption that you actually want to be one.1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes -
Replying to @THISWILLWORK @posco
I may be wrong, but I'm not being disingenuous. I genuinely believe the phrasing comes off the way I claim it does.
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Replying to @shlevy @THISWILLWORK
By the way, I mostly wrote it thinking about the breakage that one OSS project puts on another. I don’t see why that is entitled. I am interested in an ecosystem, I think this is part.
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Replying to @posco @THISWILLWORK
Hmm maybe what I was missing was the assumption that the maintainer sees their actions as part of an ecosystem that they're still interested in thriving, and the consequences are just not apparent to them?
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"Making a breaking change may undermine the system you're trying to be a part of, but it's hard to get a good sense of the impact" seems to convey the same notion if so, but without the implication that you're somehow actively harming/externalizing onto downstream in doing so.
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Replying to @shlevy @THISWILLWORK
Yes. That is a good restatement. I think if people could see the true cost of each change, they would weigh breaking changes differently.
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I've been in a community (Common Lisp) where often fixing a bug was considered a "breaking change" by some, and patches sent downstream to accommodate the change were sometimes rejected... You can never please everyone. In the end you must pick your own utility function.
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