This is one of the sanest comments I've ever seen describing what FOSS actually is. I think you nailed it when you said:
> We can't just say "Oh FOSS is better than much closed software" when things are good, then immaturely reply "its just a dumb hobby, you're dumb for trusting me," when things go south.
It's weird. There are the explicit expectations of FOSS (mostly just licenses, which say very little), and the implicit expectations (everything else).
It's anarchic and ad hoc in a way that leaves the question of "what are we actually doing with this project(s)" up for all kinds of situational interpretation, as you noted. This is bad, because this ambiguity leads to conflict when the various actors are forced to reveal their expectations, and in doing so show that their expectations are actually quite divergent (i.e., "this is my fun hobby project!" vs. "my company fails without this bugfix!" vs. "I thought this was a community project!" vs. "This project is for me and my company, I call the shots, you're welcome to look at the code, though").
It's a little bit like the companies that are like "we have a flat management hierarchy, no one really reports to anyone else". It's just not true. It's almost always used as a ruse to dupe a certain class of participant that isn't sophisticated enough to know that these kinds of implicit power hierarchies leave them at a disadvantage. There's always a structure, it's just whether that structure is explicit or not. This kind of wishy-washy refusal to codify project roles/importance in FOSS is not doing us any favors. In fact I think it prevents us from actively recognizing the "clean water" role that an enormous number of projects play.
There's real labor power here if we want it, but our continued desire to have FOSS be everything to everyone is choking it.
> We can't just say "Oh FOSS is better than much closed software" when things are good, then immaturely reply "its just a dumb hobby, you're dumb for trusting me," when things go south.
It's weird. There are the explicit expectations of FOSS (mostly just licenses, which say very little), and the implicit expectations (everything else).
It's anarchic and ad hoc in a way that leaves the question of "what are we actually doing with this project(s)" up for all kinds of situational interpretation, as you noted. This is bad, because this ambiguity leads to conflict when the various actors are forced to reveal their expectations, and in doing so show that their expectations are actually quite divergent (i.e., "this is my fun hobby project!" vs. "my company fails without this bugfix!" vs. "I thought this was a community project!" vs. "This project is for me and my company, I call the shots, you're welcome to look at the code, though").
It's a little bit like the companies that are like "we have a flat management hierarchy, no one really reports to anyone else". It's just not true. It's almost always used as a ruse to dupe a certain class of participant that isn't sophisticated enough to know that these kinds of implicit power hierarchies leave them at a disadvantage. There's always a structure, it's just whether that structure is explicit or not. This kind of wishy-washy refusal to codify project roles/importance in FOSS is not doing us any favors. In fact I think it prevents us from actively recognizing the "clean water" role that an enormous number of projects play.
There's real labor power here if we want it, but our continued desire to have FOSS be everything to everyone is choking it.