I don't know when society in general just said "Fuck It" to the idea of stewardship; but we now have it ingrained that people in positions of trust and power (whether volunteered, elected or appointed) are not morally or ethically beholden or responsible to the communities they have taken it upon themselves to represent.
At least we used to pay lip service to that ideal.
> At least we used to pay lip service to that ideal.
When was that? For as long as I can recall, a core mantra of free/libre software has been that it was provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Decades ago the dominant response I recall was one of gratitude and a little amazement that ad-hoc communities of volunteers were making real software that wasn't just academic but on par with commercial offerings. Some of those communities chose to adopt a user-friendly posture because they wanted people to like them but plenty did not and just did their own thing. As long as they could attract contributors they kept going.
Personally what concerns me is this growing expectation that volunteering to maintain an open source project also means you are "morally or ethically beholden or responsible" to anyone who uses it. In practice that seems to mean maintainers must respond to user requests or end up on the receiving end of a great deal of vitriol. It's no wonder so many volunteer maintainers who have internalized this responsibility are burning out, and how many more potential maintainers are dissuaded by seeing what is happening to the current maintainers.
Well, concurrent with this decline in stewardship has been a decline in graciousness towards volunteers, so I see your point.
I remember when I was younger, every volunteering experience I had was a delight; people thanking me for my time, getting me free coffee "just because", etc. Some of my more recent volunteering experiences have been less pleasant.
They didn't necessarily "choose communities to represent". As the maintainer and author of various open source libraries and tools that are used by many thousands, in most cases it's just that ... I'm one of the few willing to spend the time on it, and it's usually useful for myself as well. I don't really "represent" any community or anyone.
That said, I certainly wouldn't have put in this change myself, because I wouldn't like to inconvenience anyone. But that's just basic good manners that you should have in every-day life to random strangers.
That's a very different thing than joining GNU. If your package gets adopted by thousands of peoples that's having this community thrust upon you.
I still feel you have an obligation to transfer to someone willing to shoulder the responsibility if this happens, an obligation incurred by publishing it in the first place.
Jim Meyering made the change, who has been maintaining these things from before half the people here were born.
Even when taking over maintainership for popular packages later on, people often aren't exactly breaking down the door for it. So my philosophy is simple: "if you do the work, you get to decide". I may like or dislike these decisions, and at times I may even rant about how stupid a certain decision is, but in the end ... the people doing the work get to decide. The alternative of being beholden to a vaguely defined "community" of armchair quarterbacks is much worse, IMO.
Well, if I write some software for my own use, put it on the internet "because why not?", and lots of people start using then that's nice. But ... I don't think putting anything on the internet automatically imparts any kind of responsibility towards "the community", which usually means "people who download and use your software, the overwhelming majority never give anything back in the form of code, bug reports, money, or anything else".
But like I already said in my previous comment, I wouldn't have made this change myself. I actually strongly disagree with it. But I can also accept that other people have a different attitude, and that's okay too, even if I personally don't really care much for the particular attitude.
Funny you mention OpenBSD, because OpenBSD is very much "by the developers, for the developers" and has a fairly decent "fuck off" attitude once people start making demands (which I don't think is a negative per se).
Are you suggesting that a 15 year deprecation path is a fuck it attitude towards stewardship?
Distros are free to've replaced the symlinks with wrapper scripts in the meantime. Granted, I expect Arch will go ahead & let the symlinks disappear. But I can't imagine what you think of Arch's stewardship
I expect this should have about as little impact as the usr merge many distros have gone through
I'm replying to the attitude in the comment I'm replying to, if I meant this as a comment on GNU's approach to fgrep/egrep, it would have been top level.
The original deprecation seems ... petty? Not sure why it's a priority, but whatever.
I know there are scripts still in use that I wrote more than a decade ago that might do weird things now and I wish the maintainers best of luck.
One major issue with humans is that sacrifice begins to be expected and often is not rewarded. When a job not only becomes thankless, or near enough, but also expected as the default, it becomes hurtful to continue doing it.
Are the stewards being provided fair compensation? How do we even talk about what is fair compensation when non-monetary compensation has become difficult to even discuss (often due to past instances being extreme disproportionate or of a form that is no longer tolerable).
The simplest way to put it is that if you can't find a steward you aren't paying enough and trying to use appeals to morals or ethics to get people to accept lower pay no longer holds as much weight when being moral or ethical no longer provides the same level of non-monetary benefits.
> One major issue with humans is that sacrifice begins to be expected and often is not rewarded. When a job not only becomes thankless, or near enough, but also expected as the default, it becomes hurtful to continue doing it.
Oh, most definitely. The anger and vitriol I see directed towards maintainers, or volunteers of any type, who are "stepping back for personal reasons" is horrifying.
My father was a very active volunteer in his community ... the number of people who were mad at him when he stepped away after his heart problems was startling. Conversely, the number of people who volunteered to help him and my mother with shopping etc. when COVID hit was heart warming.
This is "back in my day"-levels of lazy armchair criticism. Nothing has changed. People will always make decisions that you disagree with, and they are more likely than not doing it in a good faith attempt to benefit the community. These sorts of inflammatory and hyperbolic comments help nobody, and are just childishly over-the-top. egrep going away is not evidence of moral or ethical bankruptcy, just wow.
At least we used to pay lip service to that ideal.