There have been discussions in the aftermath of the log4j vulnerability about whether or not open source is broken or sustainable, what we can do to i

Entitlement in Open Source | Mike McQuaid

submited by
Style Pass
2022-09-21 11:00:07

There have been discussions in the aftermath of the log4j vulnerability about whether or not open source is broken or sustainable, what we can do to improve the sustainability of the open source ecosystem moving forwards, and the entitlement of users and companies in expecting maintainers to fix their problems.

As the project leader of Homebrew, a macOS and Linux package manager with millions of users, I have experienced, and continue to experience, a lot of entitled behaviour from contributors and users of Homebrew. Ironically, this is often worse coming from employed developers’ large tech companies with fantastic profit margins. Similarly, being a staff engineer based in Scotland at GitHub and working in a very different time zone to my peers, I have learned that setting consistent, clear and firm boundaries with people in my open source and professional work results in a better experience for (almost) everyone.

Bob works for TechCorp and discovered a few years ago that using a tool installed from Homebrew results in a 90% speedup on an otherwise boring, manual task he has to perform regularly. This tool is increasingly integrated into tooling, documentation and process at TechCorp and everyone is happy, particularly Bob. Bob receives a good performance review for improving the process at TechCorp.

Leave a Comment