DAdanwee·Aug 25, 2022
You are right, but in practice that's not what happens. Companies do not rely on open source libraries, the developers working for such companies do.
I can give you a realistic example. If you want to use Kafka and Go, your probably only option is to use https://github.com/confluentinc/confluent-kafka-go. Its LICENSE explicitly says "no warranty". Now, what if I find a bug in the library? Only two realistic solutions from my side:
1. I submit the issue and hope for the maintainers to fix it
2. I dig deeper and try to fix the issue. I submit the PR
None of the above scenarios are guaranteed to have a happy ending. The issue could be ignored, or piled up among thousand of other (maybe higher prio) issues. My solution may not be optimal and could be rejected (or if it's optimal, nobody is taking a look at it, and it could remain open for wee
Read the rest
ks/months).
> If that is a problem for you, negotiate a different contract up front - with the maintainer or someone else willing to do the work. That probably means paying them.
In the real world that would mean that I go to my manager and asks them to pay money to the maintainers of confluent-kafka-go to fix the issue I found. I don't think my manager would approve that, but let's imagine he does. The guys at confluent-kafka-go may not want money to fix the issue. These guys have probably already jobs that pay them well, and they work on the library at will.
Note: I'm talking about confluent-kafka-go, which I know is behind the Confluent software company. But I could as well be talking about libraries maintained by individuals like https://github.com/edenhill/librdkafka