> In my opinion, the spirit of open source goes beyond just tossing code over a wall for people to look at. In my opinion, it means accepting engagement from your users, their inputs and their contributions when/where warranted.
I disagree. There's nothing about open source or the various open source licenses that require accepting engagement from the community and/or contributions.
Open source means allowing modifications, and sharing those modifications. It's in most licenses that the software is provided as is and without warranty.
> In my opinion, for something to be truly open source, I should be able to fix a bug I ran into, or implement a feature from the backlog and contribute it back upstream. If upstream is just going to ignore my contribution, pretend it doesn't exist, or reject it just because - then that codebase is just pretending to be open source.
A project not accepting outside contributions is still open source, not pretending to be, and the beauty of it is - if you want it to accept outside contributions, you are able to fork it and accept contributions on your own fork, or otherwise share your modifications. But there's absolutely no obligation of the original dev/owner to accept or engage with anything from the community. It's in the license, the software is provided as is and without warranty of any kind.
Maybe it's worthwhile to coin a new term, community software, to specifically make a distinction between projects that are community developed (accept contributions) vs those that don't.
I disagree. There's nothing about open source or the various open source licenses that require accepting engagement from the community and/or contributions.
Open source means allowing modifications, and sharing those modifications. It's in most licenses that the software is provided as is and without warranty.
> In my opinion, for something to be truly open source, I should be able to fix a bug I ran into, or implement a feature from the backlog and contribute it back upstream. If upstream is just going to ignore my contribution, pretend it doesn't exist, or reject it just because - then that codebase is just pretending to be open source.
A project not accepting outside contributions is still open source, not pretending to be, and the beauty of it is - if you want it to accept outside contributions, you are able to fork it and accept contributions on your own fork, or otherwise share your modifications. But there's absolutely no obligation of the original dev/owner to accept or engage with anything from the community. It's in the license, the software is provided as is and without warranty of any kind.
Maybe it's worthwhile to coin a new term, community software, to specifically make a distinction between projects that are community developed (accept contributions) vs those that don't.