No, it doesn't. Yes, there are general safety regulations in any country, but there are no hard rules as to what "satisfactory" or "fit for purpose" means.
My analogy was contrived to make a point. Of course serving actual feces is not "satisfactory". But I imagine that you can extrapolate my analogy into an infinite number of possibilities where someone who once enjoyed certain services or products can find them not "satisfactory" anymore. That is a commonplace situation in any marketplace, and it is perfectly valid for the person on the receiving end to be upset about it.
The one hole you can poke at my analogy, which I anticipated, is that there is (typically) no financial transaction between users and developers of free software. But my response to this is that a financial transaction is not a requirement for the social contract to be established with users of any product or service, regardless of its distribution or business model. Those users can still expect a certain level of service, and understandably so. This expectation exists whether the person is a customer or not.
A closer analogy might be a community kitchen, or garden. But it really makes no difference to my argument.
The free software philosophy is agnostic to how software is monetized. It's true that it is more difficult to do so than with proprietary software, but it's certainly not impossible. Many companies have been built and thrive on producing free software. The crucial thing, regardless of the business model, is to treat all your users with the same amount of respect, dedication, and honesty. The moment you stop doing that, don't be surprised when the community pushes back. That's on you, not on "entitled" users.
> No, it doesn't. Yes, there are general safety regulations in any country, but there are no hard rules as to what "satisfactory" or "fit for purpose" means.
There are not specific rules for every type of product in consumer law because that wouldn't be workable. Instead, you have to make your case in court, if it gets that far, that it doesn't meet that criteria. The judgements have to be made by squishy fallible humans, but it does happen; small claims courts rule on that sort of thing all the time. Your example would surely be found unsatisfactory.
So, yes, in the UK and other countries with a functioning political system, buying a product literally does buy you the right for satisfactory quality, and the right to get your money back if it isn't. That applies to everything from sandwiches to cars to email providers. (Again, that's only if you're a consumer. Protections are much weaker if you're purchasing as a business.)
I set a deliberately contrived example to illustrate why someone might be understandably upset when a service or product they've been enjoying degrades in quality, regardless of whether they paid for it or not, and the parallels that situation has with OSS rug pulls. Yet you've managed to make this about consumer protection laws, for some reason.
Since the conversation has derailed, and since I really don't have the patience to rehash everything I've already said in this thread, I'm out.
It's not contrived, it's just bad, unfit for the conversation at all. A meal at a restaurant is paid for, MiniIO is not. There's no room for "regardless whether they paid for it or not", the distinction is fundamental to the discussion. You don't get to decide it doesn't matter.
You can't complain that the neighbour who used to give you a handful of apples each day suddenly stops giving them to you, regardless of how dependent on them you've become. He did not "create an expectation", you did. He did not make you "dependent" on himself, you did.
I ignored your point because it wasn't relevant to what I was saying. I was just pointing out a factual error.
It's a bit like someone pointed out a simple spelling mistake in your comment, so you rewrote your whole argument at them. Or even claimed that you had spelled it right after all!
No, it doesn't. Yes, there are general safety regulations in any country, but there are no hard rules as to what "satisfactory" or "fit for purpose" means.
My analogy was contrived to make a point. Of course serving actual feces is not "satisfactory". But I imagine that you can extrapolate my analogy into an infinite number of possibilities where someone who once enjoyed certain services or products can find them not "satisfactory" anymore. That is a commonplace situation in any marketplace, and it is perfectly valid for the person on the receiving end to be upset about it.
The one hole you can poke at my analogy, which I anticipated, is that there is (typically) no financial transaction between users and developers of free software. But my response to this is that a financial transaction is not a requirement for the social contract to be established with users of any product or service, regardless of its distribution or business model. Those users can still expect a certain level of service, and understandably so. This expectation exists whether the person is a customer or not.
A closer analogy might be a community kitchen, or garden. But it really makes no difference to my argument.
The free software philosophy is agnostic to how software is monetized. It's true that it is more difficult to do so than with proprietary software, but it's certainly not impossible. Many companies have been built and thrive on producing free software. The crucial thing, regardless of the business model, is to treat all your users with the same amount of respect, dedication, and honesty. The moment you stop doing that, don't be surprised when the community pushes back. That's on you, not on "entitled" users.