alt Hacker NewsRecently, I've noticed a certain idea a lot I didn't see before: that if you make something a lot of people like, you have a responsibility to them. In the real world, this happens if someone has planted a tree in their garden and people like how it looks, then when they want to cut it down, "the community" would like an opinion.
Likewise, in the open-source world, after a certain number of things start depending on your work, people often say it "should be considered a public good" - which is particularly confusing because public good seems something entirely different from its other well-known definition.
I think this whole idea of "if you make something nice that other people like, you are obligated to serve people forever" is totally bogus. I (well Claude+Codex) write a lot of LLM code these days and many of the base libraries are open source. If I had to write ratatui it would take a long time. But if someone decided to bully the ratatui maintainer I wouldn't ever know. And there's no way to un-bully someone anyway.
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OSS has gone off the rails recently. There’s a project under the Apache Software Foundation—I forget which—that is essentially a byproduct of the operations of a Chinese beverage company. That’s more like what I remember.
We’re talking about code that users can modify themselves to solve their own problems. That’s it. I don’t need to hear about the struggle.
> In the real world, this happens if someone has planted a tree in their garden and people like how it looks, then when they want to cut it down, "the community" would like an opinion.
I wouldn't actually put this forward as an argument for the concept of "community ownership", but I will point out that there are many circumstances where the ownership of trees on your yard is actually significantly decided by the community you live in. Whether that's your HOA, or city regulations, or tree law, what you do on your own personal property is often not just your own isolated thing.