Yes: it sucks when someone misreads your intentions. It sucks when they ascribe malice. Your instinct is going to be to argue that there was no malice. But presence or absence of malice by the communicator literally doesn't matter. What matters is someone was hurt.
When a maintainer of an OSS project removes a feature, it forces people to either use an unmaintained (eventually vulnerable, bitrotted) piece of software or allocate time to upgrade. When an ecosystem is involved, that process can take a huge amount of time.
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Is this really evidence of a power imbalance? Is the maintainer in the wrong for doing this. Do they need to apologize or take corrective action?
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The maintainer isn't in the wrong, but they should interpret the anger as the result of a power imbalance. Too often the maintainer feels like they're the one on the bottom side of a power dynamic and that's what's wrong.
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The owner of my favorite burger joint retired, and I can't find a burger quite as good. Very upsetting. Is his choice to spend his time differently a power imbalance?
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You're assuming "power imbalance" means that someone is "to blame". I'm just using it to explain how to interpret angry people.
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And retiring from OSS is much different from what I'm talking about, which is making decisions about the direction of a popular project that affect people without asking them. Sometimes the decision wouldn't matter much either way and it ends up being careless.
End of conversation
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Lots of complaining comes from the feeling of helplessness that users of software feel in situations like this.
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