Maybe we should establish a "maintenance.md" practice just like "readme.md" or "LICENSE" where you just clearly outline the amount of maintenance the project/development team are planning to put into the code base and under which conditions.
I have seen that a few times but maybe it should be more of a standard.
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@tante @mhoye proposed something like that a while back: https://github.com/mhoye/maintenance-terms
@tante
A while back I found an essay titled "Healthy expectations in open source" by @donmccurdy that proposes just such a standard:
https://www.donmccurdy.com/2023/07/03/expectations-in-open-source/
I found the classifications well thought out and have started to use it for my own small projects.
This was the accompanying Fediverse post: https://fosstodon.org/@donmccurdy/110662029314944366
@tante
"There is no project. No development team. This scratched my itch. You are welcome to the code."
@tante or how much work to maintain for the sysadmin to update/upgrade between versions... That's usually my first question.
@mhoye super cool!
@tante @mhoye maybe something like this could be built into #radicle https://radicle.xyz
In the Nebula project, we have a project status section at the end of https://nebula-plugins.github.io/documentation/plugin_overview.html that addresses some of this stuff.
@tante https://www.tc54.org/contributing-yaml/ although I think all of these file types end up going stale pretty quickly
The CRA asks Open Source Software Stewards to do something like this.
"I will not maintain this code at all. Use fully at your own risk" is valid.
I think it's just important to make that clear.
@tante I think this is the baseline unless anything else is explicitly stated.
(The reverse timeline algorithm led me to this only after the previous post.)
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@tante But that's what most open source licenses already say: PROVIDED AS IS
For me that's as clear as I can be. Of course that also means I won't try to convince people to use my code. Or if I ever do that and present at a conference, my talk will mention this part of the license. 🤷
@odoruhako @tante I’m continually surprised at how many people insist that there somehow entitled to free support from a BSD licenced project.
We care about our code, its usability, and our users, and we welcome active contributors.
If you’re a company then the onus is on you to find ways to contribute to the commons, & not just demand free help.
If you’re slurping it up with AI (and burning our resources while doing it) & turning our commits into your product, then that applies even more so.
@odoruhako that's the legalese framing (which is mostly a "we don't wanna be sued" solution). But projects _do_ act differently and bigger projects do - voluntatrily - to way more: Defined release cadences, support windows, etc. And that is to a certain degree the expectation that people have been trained on - even though it does not scale especially not to single developer projects.