that is fine, but one these projects cross some point, the creators have the tendency to forget their motivation being selfish in the first place, and try to promote their creation as if what they had in mind was to solve problem for other people.
"labor of love To scratch an itch To explore an idea"
that by no mean is a bad thing, it just means doing things for themselves, to express, to learn etc, typical of creative work.
People do that all the time. However in OSS there is this thing when people feel they need to present their work as useful to others eventhough clearly what drives their work has nothing to do with other peoples' needs, it's just their itch.
> the original motivators behind "Open Source" is scratching your own itch.
that's what I said, and you repeated it, as if it's some new insight or supports some argument.
Is there not an issue in OSS where thing that should not be used in commercial context, are used in commercial context, they break, then people blame the adopters for expecting too much from OSS? Rarely the other side of the coin is addressed which is creators (not all of them) went out of their way to promote adoption of these things.
Here is an analogy: art design chair sold as office work chair. Of course if you are smart you would not buy them because over time the ergonomic would kill you. But that doesn't mean no one would. When some gullible people buys these chair, you say: idiots. However, I bet you also think about the people who made these chairs paid for TV commercials that never show the ergonomics of the thing, and question their responsibility.
You are saying a different thing now. Your previous comment touched a philosophical matter. Now it's about using, in a commercial product, OSS software people develop in their own time and that they might promote too much (I read this as "irresponsibly"). Both of these do not apply only to this kind of software and even if they did, what is the point of having this discussion (which could be an interesting one) here? If anything, we should encourage people that choose do this sort of work in this day and age.
they can, but don't have to, again there is nothing wrong with doing thing for yourself. Saying people always have others' interest in mind when doing side project does not reflect reality. Many of these projects are built with minimal feedback, so if they solve other people's problem it's by coincidence. I'm talking past the project in discussion of course, I don't know anything about it.
