You also say "legal right" but it's incredibly vague what this is supposed to mean. Nobody cares about this stuff unless the project reaches a certain level of popularity. So once you get over 1000 github stars, should github force you to sign a contract saying you'll respond to emails in a timely manner or they take away your stars? I don't think I need to explain why that doesn't make any sense.
Instead, I am just saying that if I upload a "cool tool" to github, and I notice that it has become super popular, and I don't have time/interest/inclination to maintain it --- I would personally feel a RESPONSIBILITY, and probably social obligation (not a legal obligation) to either put a note saying "this is not actively maintained, please find an up-to-date fork. user/cooltool seems to have community support but I can't personally endorse it." or simply make some other people additional/replacement maintainers for the project which I'm not interested in maintaining anymore.
You alone decided that maintainers have all these obligations (which I would consider reasonable things to do for the record), but the maintainer of this library doesn't agree, and the license doesn't require it, so you're just setting yourself up for disappointment here.
'responsibility'
'requirement' 'obligation' 'should' 'can'
I believe responsibilities are personal/societal. They're part of a value system. However, I think I could collate a breadth of sources from landmark open source discussions which show that there are existing major themes for what a maintainer has a responsibility to do (that the open source community has a somewhat predefined value system existing wrt to topic).
I accept that it's not a consensus.
I just don't think we should conflate obligations, requirements, and responsibilities. That leads to vehement disagreements.
I agree with all of this, but I also feel that you need to be mentally prepared for any maintainer to fail to meet these moral responsibilities unless you want to be disappointed and should act accordingly (not saying you don't already do this in practice).
> I accept that it's not a consensus. I just don't think we should conflate obligations, requirements, and responsibilities. That leads to vehement disagreements.
I agree 100%.
I mean, I'd say that it is a maintainer's responsibility to do some of these things. If they can't, they should allow another interested&qualified person to be the maintainer instead. I understand that it's their right to abdicate these responsibilities. It's not illegal or anything. They can choose to be irresponsible, yes. But personally, I think that maintaining the repo is the maintainer's responsibility. And I think the responsible way to do that involves "following best-practices, responding to feedback/PRs, or responding in any coherent way to anything asked of them."
I'm NOT saying a maintainer should have to add features to satiate the masses. I'm merely saying that a "maintainer" has some small duty to "maintain" a product, and also acknowledging that they have a legal right to abdicate that responsibility.
I'm not sure anyone should be immune from social criticism. They can always make someone else the maintainer and avoid any future work/limelight/criticism.
I won't touch the childish vs. adult debate as it pertains to abdicating one's responsibilities.
I am also NOT saying that people should "expect to be be served high-quality open-source software for free, and then outrage when it isn't." But it seems like it's a maintainer's responsibility to allow (and maybe even facilitate) competent, motivated individuals to contribute to their open-source project.
I also don't know exactly what the reddit brigading involved, this is the first time I've heard of this story. Harassment obviously is not okay and, not coincidentally, is illegal.