Recently, I've noticed a certain idea a lot I didn't see before: that if you make something a lot of people like, you have a responsibility to them. In the real world, this happens if someone has planted a tree in their garden and people like how it looks, then when they want to cut it down, "the community" would like an opinion.

Likewise, in the open-source world, after a certain number of things start depending on your work, people often say it "should be considered a public good" - which is particularly confusing because public good seems something entirely different from its other well-known definition.

I think this whole idea of "if you make something nice that other people like, you are obligated to serve people forever" is totally bogus. I (well Claude+Codex) write a lot of LLM code these days and many of the base libraries are open source. If I had to write ratatui it would take a long time. But if someone decided to bully the ratatui maintainer I wouldn't ever know. And there's no way to un-bully someone anyway.