I 100% agree with this. It also is 100% OK to fork aggressively and patch yourself.

(And on the flipside, nothing is owed for a bugfix the maintainer made out of their own free will. Again, a gift.)

The problem is lots of open source is unmaintained/insecure, and there aren't any security engineers on those open source libraries.

For the library to be secure, there needs to be funding, not by magic and expecting maintainers will do stuff on there free will.

The person needing a feature can do implement it themselves or pay for it. They may even share it, in the spirit of open source, but they probably don't have to (depending on license conditions).

Is your perspective here "these things need to be useful/stable/secure, how do we make them/create incentive for them to be what we need them to be"? Because my view is more like "open source is a sprawling wild garden and occasionally a tree bears fruit, and anyone gets to have some for as long as it does."

The assumed base state we're looking to augment via open source software being: "Fully working software"(Augmented: free) vs "No software" (Augmented: yes software)?

Like, what you seem to want is business, plain and simple. Pay a guy, have your specs filled, get guarantees. That would be expecting open source to fill a role it just isn't made for.

Correct, maintainers can say that and get shamed.

And it leads to unmaintained libraries, since companies don't want to pay.

At some point, is open sourcing your work a liability?

Help normalize saying no? As an OSS maintainer, the sense of entitlement many have is quite frustrating. After years in OSS, I have built up a thick skin and am fine saying no, but many aren't.

I’m sure many companies like to pay. It’s probably the cheapest way to solve a business problem. It should be the norm. If a company wants to have a bug fixed or a feature added, they should pay. And GitHub should make it easy to do so.

> Correct, maintainers can say that and get shamed.

And then they can shrug and move on with their respective days. If I open source something it's a gift to the commons, not a promise to work on it for free in perpetuity. I don't really care if someone tries to shame me for that, as there's nothing to be ashamed of.

I always chuckle at indignant GH comments on OSS projects. There should be a subreddit dedicated to them. Like a specific kind of r/choosingbeggars

If you look at the issue list for any significant open source project, it's probably of nonzero size. That's a way of saying "no": just don't do it.

Maybe you're overloaded, maybe you just don't feel like it. It's totally normal, and different projects have different levels of resources, some with none anymore.

I have seen small utility libraries like tj-actions get compromised because there aren't any security specialists looking at the library.

My main concern is supply chain compromise.

Unless you're talking about a different event, tj-actions wasn't "compromised because there aren't any security specialists looking at the library". Instead, an API key was used, maybe by the author, maybe by someone else, to replace good code with bad code, including modifying historical release tags to point to the bad code.

That said, everything in my previous post still applies: a nonzero buglist is totally normal and widely accepted.

I'm not too sure about the root cause about tj-actions. IIRC there are some libraries that compromised by actions injections vulnerabilities, where a security specialist could have helped.

> At some point, is open sourcing your work a liability?

I argue that open sourcing your work is no more liable than making a comment on social media. The biggest risk to an open source maintainer is publicly losing their patience and/or being heterodox in their beliefs. Code isn't a requirement for that to happen.

Are there honestly examples of maintainers being shamed for that?