It is your choice to use open source software without open sourcing your own work or without contributing.
But by engaging in open source you engage in a social contract, you become part of a community whose goal it is to foster collaboration and help one another, other people start to rely on you, just as you rely on their libraries, compilers, and kernels.
The author choose to break that social contract out of spite. He created a scenario where people choose to rely on him, when they could have relied on other works, and then screwed them over majorly.
... or use Windows / MacOS / Solaris / any other commercial OS he paid for...
> by engaging in open source you engage in a social contract
You heck. You simply allow other people to use your work as they see fit. That's it. The only contract is the license, and the license is very explicit in denying the existence of any other tie, explicit or implicit.
But we can go beyond that, and start to do more work, and make grander social promises. Calls for a "community" come with the implicit agreement that this codebase now exists for more than just the one person who initialized it. And that you've pushed it into the public, and requested people to treat your repo as the repo, you've taken on certain responsibilities, and made some implicit, or explicit, promises.
Sometimes the job is thrust upon the maintainer accidentally (eg Linus), and sometimes it is requested (apparently in this case?)
But nonetheless it's a natural function of the OSS community, and there are ways to deny the responsibility appropriately, and inappropriately.
But it's there is much more nuance to this than dumping a box, or reading a legal contract (which is never representative of social contracts; it's just the bare minimum to avoid responsibility in the eyes of a lawsuit.)
What they did was climb through everyones window to get the cardboard box back, just as with the npm leftpad incident.
Stop painting the narative like people demand some volunteer to do more free work, when all they do is ask to not be actively sabotaged.
And frankly I don't buy the story that they wanted to put the code on their own repository anyways, seems more like a concession because the other contributors also hold some copyright.
If your workflow relied on a package being delivered every morning, even unchanged, it's your own fault. He never made that guarantee.
Stop painting the narrative like people owe you anything, when you're just failing to correctly evaluate the actual resiliency (non-)guarantees of production pipelines based on random github repositories.
And yes shockingly people are entitled to be treated fairly and not to be sabotaged. And no, providing them with a library for a limited period of time and then being fed up with it's maintenance doesn't somehow earn you that right. It gives you the right to walk away, but clearly thats wasn't enough for the author.
But hey if you want that to live and bathe in that kind of toxicity, enjoy!
Prove it.
"But by engaging in open source you engage in a social contract" https://gist.github.com/richhickey/1563cddea1002958f96e7ba95...
Actix was written in rust. Rust is OS. qed.
Quote from Rich's gist.
>> I'm sure you know better about the one true way to write software. But kindly don't burn the community down on your way out, with self-serving proclamations.
The actix author could just have walked away, no harm done, push one button "Archive", go outside and enjoy the sun.
Instead they choose to throw a tantrum, write a pamphlet and nuke everything.
Entitlement goes both ways.