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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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[-] WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world 25 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

That view of open source only applies for non-profits and hobbyists, releasing code that solves their problems altruistically.

Corporations, startups, and VC's abuse open source by using it as a means to gain goodwill and trust until they are funded or profitable, then they perform a bait and switch or other parasitic practices; they deserve the hate, and can eat shit and die.

Also, if you're not gonna follow semver don't use semver. Just use YYYY-MM-DD or whatever. Quite simple really.

Regarding this project; anyone who chooses to use new (thus untrustworthy) foss libraries in prod without version pinning and thorough integration testing is an idiot.

[-] bitfucker@programming.dev 10 points 1 week ago

V1.2.3 is not unique to semver tho. So it could really be anything like linux 7.1.2. To be fair, linux does predate semver by a long time. But the point is that not every software with #.#.# needs to be semver. And I think better-auth, from the issue linked, has stated that they don't yet follow semver somewhere in their docs.

[-] WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world 1 points 5 days ago

If the versioning has no meaning, or conflicts with a widely held standard, why not switch to datever? Then we at least know how out of date we are...

[-] bitfucker@programming.dev 2 points 5 days ago

I ask the inverse. Why should you demand that every project that uses x.y.z versioning be a semver? A widely held standard only applies if you actually want to follow it in the first place. You know HTTP spec didn't mention anything about the body in GET requests and so almost every web server just ignores body on GET? Yeah, some software decided to use that. And guess what? That software? It was Elasticsearch. People are free to do whatever they want with their software. If they decided to publish something non standard and you decided to use it, you can ask them nicely to follow standard, or make an adapter for it.

[-] Feathercrown@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

Yeah, choosing to establish the semver social contract and then break it is not great

[-] fruitcantfly@programming.dev 7 points 1 week ago

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 5 days ago

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 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days 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/

[-] WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

If you do not know about semver then you are not a programmer. It's in the first paragraph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_versioning

this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2026
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