this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2026
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Programming

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Open source is a thankless job and I think we've lost the plot on how we treat maintainers (github.com)
submitted 4 days ago by sanitation@lemmy.today to c/programming@programming.dev
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I saw an issue today on a fairly popular project (better-auth, see the link to the issue attached). No repro, no context, just a wall of caps and profanity ending in "fuck you". The maintainers ship this for free. People run production businesses on top of it, for free. And the thanks is someone raging into a text box because a minor bump cost them an afternoon.

I maintain and contribute to a few projects myself, so this hits a nerve a bit. Something people don't see from the outside: it's not enough to know how to build the thing. You also have to know how to defuse a thread where someone's insulting you and not fire back, even though most of us aren't paid for any of it, let alone the work of staying civil while being told to get fucked.

I'm not pretending breaking changes don't cause real pain (that's what the issue is about). But I keep coming back to a boundary question: if you're not paying for it, do you actually get to demand anything? (Obviously yes, but we still need some boundaries)

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[–] fruitcantfly@programming.dev 7 points 3 days ago (2 children)

But they never established a "semver social contract". You can't assume that project follows semver just because it has an x.y.z version number; semver is not the only versioning scheme, it's just a very popular one

[–] WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world 0 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Why would you use the syntax of the most widely adopted versioning schema in software engineering, then not follow it?

This isn't linux; it's a 2 year old project ffs. That's just ignorance or incompetence, but poor design decisions are expected from an AI slop project. Unless you can enlighten us on the logic of the chosen schema, you shouldn't defend them.

[–] Mikina@programming.dev 1 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago)

This is the first time I'm hearing about semver contract. I always assumed the x.y.z versioning was pridever, which was the first definition I found. And that says nothing about backwards compatibility.

So it might as well be the case of the XKCD.

https://pridever.org/