One place I’m sympathetic to this view is when a user has discovered a non-controversial bug in an active project and the user has provided a reasonable patch. If the project lets months go by without reviewing or adjudicating on the contribution, and adds code that conflicts with the patch, I'm inclined to say something has gone wrong.
So first, I think it's true more generally that individuals or organizations have some obligation to fulfil social contracts they make, even when implicit.
I think simply the act of releasing something as open source has a pretty low implication of active maintenance - we've all seen companies "throw code over the wall" and can calibrate our expectations appropriately. However, if the project signals a desire to create a community around it - docs, blog posts, chat rooms, multiple releases, issues in the issue tracker, etc - then I do think that creates an implicit social contract that users will be helped out, and when (as in Steven's hypothetical) there's an apparently active project but participation in that project gets neglected, I think the maintainers are shirking on their obligations.
I agree with everything you say here. I think it points to the need for 2 more nuanced views:
"Simply releasing open source software implies an obligation for the releaser to support it.”
”Creating and maintaining a community [around a piece of open source software] implies an obligation for creators/maintainers to support its users by responding to queries, adopting noncontroversial fixes – generally listening.”
I can then more easily disagree with the first and agree with the second.
I've now added a "Related views" feature that allows capturing this sort of incremental improvement in the quality of views due to the discussion, and added related views for this one.
So first, I think it's true more generally that individuals or organizations have some obligation to fulfil social contracts they make, even when implicit.
I think simply the act of releasing something as open source has a pretty low implication of active maintenance - we've all seen companies "throw code over the wall" and can calibrate our expectations appropriately. However, if the project signals a desire to create a community around it - docs, blog posts, chat rooms, multiple releases, issues in the issue tracker, etc - then I do think that creates an implicit social contract that users will be helped out, and when (as in Steven's hypothetical) there's an apparently active project but participation in that project gets neglected, I think the maintainers are shirking on their obligations.
I agree with everything you say here. I think it points to the need for 2 more nuanced views:
I can then more easily disagree with the first and agree with the second.
I've now added a "Related views" feature that allows capturing this sort of incremental improvement in the quality of views due to the discussion, and added related views for this one.