alt Hacker Newsjhack's perspetive is something that is all too common in tech. The implication that if code is open source the owners and maintainers don't owe consumers anything because "you can always fork or build it yourself"... as if that were ever possible for the average user, or in a digital world where anything you do with a computer depends on endless recursive sub-dependencies.
It's analogous to saying "it's your fault because you didn't read the T&C's", when all the T&C's you've implicitly agreed to already would take more than a human lifetime to read and understand. That is not a reasonable implication or expectation for the vast majority of people, the vast majority of the time; therefore it is logically corrupt, and should not be entertained.
This is ofcourse a fair point of view for 1-few person codebases built for fun, or to solve their own problems, open sourced out of the kindness of their hearts, but when the open source code is built or maintained as part of a job function (receiving a paycheck) &/or to generate profit (either directly or indirectly to influence standards, gain market share, etc) the open-sourcing is more of a means to build trust and becon attention or adoption in the age of relentless enshittification.
Open sourcing should not be an accepted path for profit seeking orgs or individuals to exploit and screw over consumers, as though they are eternal beta testers whose trust and dependence are worthless externalities. It also completely ignores the time and effort consumers must invest themselves to learn your product, workaround any errors, and build it into their workflow. That is arguably worth significantly more than whatever fee they could pay you for your code.
I still really don’t understand what is so entitled about asking for a level of base empathy and care from maintainers.
People now yell at you that their only obligation is whatever is spelled out in the license they attached to the code. I think this is the same place where the logic of Code = Law comes from. People who think that you can encode the legal/judicial system into a set of axioms. This is not how the law works nor is it how it is taught and asserting this is a fundamental misunderstanding of human systems. It is incredibly destructive when people start applying maths as ground rules for human interaction. People do not live in black/white. We live in grey.
I am certainly not old enough to have experienced it, but I would venture a guess that the reason the BSD/MIT licenses originally existed was so that the universities had a CYA clause. I think you can see this erosion from a group of people sharing software in academic and hobbyist circles into weird legal absolutism as software becomes more of a business. For instance, Bill Gates’ famous letter to hobbyists or the PKZIP fiasco.