It took me a long time to realize that Open Source does not imply any responsibility unless you want it to.
If the community decides that your software is 'critical', it is the community's responsibility to maintain it.
We, as maintainers, of course should try to help. But if I'm on vacation, or just simply don't feel like programming, that has to be acceptable. If somebody needs professional support and guaranteed availability, they should pay people to do so. I think this is the central tenet of spare-time OSS maintainership.
Perhaps we'd need a sponsorship model: A button on Github where a customer can negotiate a price with a maintainer for a particular feature or bugfix.
> If the community decides that your software is 'critical', it is the community's responsibility to maintain it.
Yep.
I think the PyPI team needs to get a lot of responses along the lines of “Let me know if you’d like to fork this ‘critical’ code, or if the obligations imply you’re prepared to pay reasonable professional consulting rates? I’m happy to remove my code from your index if required.”
If the community decides that your software is 'critical', it is the community's responsibility to maintain it.
We, as maintainers, of course should try to help. But if I'm on vacation, or just simply don't feel like programming, that has to be acceptable. If somebody needs professional support and guaranteed availability, they should pay people to do so. I think this is the central tenet of spare-time OSS maintainership.
Perhaps we'd need a sponsorship model: A button on Github where a customer can negotiate a price with a maintainer for a particular feature or bugfix.