Responsibility Exchange is Our Open-Source Attitude

Author: $Boogon$

For a long time, within the closed-source commercial software development paradigm, the fundamental goal for developers has been clear and definite: to deliver a complete, runnable software entity as early as possible for immediate use by the user. For users, their expectation corresponds directly to this: to obtain an “out-of-the-box” software product. This product is expected to be a tightly sealed whole, like a finely crafted “black box” where pressing known buttons yields predictable results, obeying a deterministic functional mapping. The interior of the box, be it intricate gears or flowing code, is neither visible nor needs to be known by the user. We might call this expectation for a complete, closed, ready-to-use product the “Black-Box Demand”. This demand has driven decades of prosperity in the software industry, defining clear delivery boundaries and accountability: developers are responsible for everything inside the box, ensuring its flawless operation; users enjoy the right to use it within predefined limits and compensate the developers for their labor.

The superiority of the “black box” model lies in the certainty and completeness of service it provides. It lowers the technical barrier to use, hides complexity behind friendly interfaces, and promises uniform quality standards and technical support. In this relationship, the user is a pure consumer, while the development team is the omnipotent producer and maintainer. All needs, defects, and improvements should, in theory, be fed back to the box’s maker, awaiting their inclusion in the next encapsulation. This forms a seemingly self-contained cycle.

However, with the birth of the open-source philosophy and the rise of the open-source movement, the foundation of the “Black-Box Demand” began to crack. People became unsatisfied with mere functional correctness of software and began to inquire about the software itself, constructing a “White-Box Demand” to open the “black box”. The essence of open source is visibility, modifiability, and redistributability of code, which first physically opens that box. But the act of opening the box initially blurs the lines of responsibility. “Visibility” means any defect is laid bare, and public scrutiny naturally brings higher expectations for perfection; “Modifiability” means users not only report issues but may also directly submit fixes, forcing maintainers to undertake the arduous task of reviewing, merging, and integrating these external contributions; “Redistributability” amplifies the voice of any specific demand, as every unmet community member theoretically holds the right to “fork” the project. When code is exposed to everyone’s gaze, an intangible pressure arises. Scrutiny, admiration, and of course, criticism from around the globe make maintainers not only accountable to “customers” but seemingly to the entire tech community, to this vast “customer’s” “ideal” and “standard”. In this atmosphere of being “watched” and “needed”, a mindset of the “omnipotent maintainer” easily sprouts: since the code is open, since great hopes are placed upon it, we should strive to meet every reasonable expectation.

Thus, projects often unconsciously slide into the trap of pursuing the “Ultimate Black Box”. Maintainers begin to treat the diverse, fragmented needs emerging from the community as to-do items they must incorporate into the box. They hope this opened box can still exhibit “out-of-the-box” completeness for everyone. Behind this lies a deep-seated perfectionist sense of responsibility rooted in engineering culture, as well as a desire for community recognition and project success. When we obsess over delivering an “Ultimate Black Box” that satisfies all users and all scenarios, we find it is an almost impossible task. Maintenance resources for open-source projects are typically non-commercial, limited, and even dependent on the maintainer’s personal time and enthusiasm. They face a global community with infinitely fragmented demands, diverse technical preferences, and vastly different use cases. Attempting to pre-install everything for everyone, trying to meet everyone’s needs, causes the project to lose focus amidst endless feature creep. The core architecture becomes bloated and fragile to accommodate五花八门 features; configuration options become dauntingly complex to cater to various scenarios, ultimately moving us away from the freedom and flexibility championed by open source. Think about it, aren’t our own demands exactly what we despise – “the user wants the whole world”?

Breaking through this dilemma requires a complete conceptual reframing: from centralized responsibility-taking to a clear Responsibility Exchange.

This requires us to re-examine the cornerstone of open-source collaboration. When the physical “black box” is opened, the clear wall between maintainers and users should also be deconstructed, replaced by a collaboration map clearly marking their respective territories. The core shift is this: maintainers no longer promise to deliver a “complete, runnable software entity”, but instead promise to deliver “core components and reliable tools that can be safely and efficiently assembled into any required entity”. In other words, we return the responsibility of out-of-the-box readiness to the user and re-developer, allowing them, based on their unique context, taste, and goals, to autonomously select, configure, and build. We seriously undertake the responsibility of ensuring autonomous building is possible, embodied in three indispensable missions: uncompromising stability, excellent extensibility, and clear, illuminating extension guides.

This is not an evasion of responsibility, but a professional division of responsibilities. Its core lies in acknowledging a fundamental fact: those who best understand business pains are inevitably the users deeply embedded in the business itself; those who best understand the software itself are inevitably the core maintainers who have grown with the software system. Responsibility Exchange allows both to play to their strengths. Maintainers need not become experts in all domains; they just need to focus on crafting the platform into an absolutely level foundation with standard joints. Users need not fathom all the mysteries of the kernel but can, with clear blueprints, build their own mansion upon this foundation.

The success of this philosophy has long been validated by numerous top-tier open-source projects. They are not famous for being “feature-complete”, but dominate their respective domains due to their excellent “buildability”.

The Linux kernel is perhaps the most extreme example of “Responsibility Exchange”. Kernel developers and maintainers never provide an “out-of-the-box” operating system. What they deliver is an extremely stable, efficient core that abstracts hardware differences. This core does not handle writing reports, creating presentation slides for office tasks, nor Spider Solitaire or music appreciation for entertainment. What it provides is unparalleled modular support, steadfast commitment to hardware standards and driver models, and exhaustive kernel documentation. Thus, responsibility is exchanged. Distributors and system integrators like Ubuntu and Android take on the responsibility of building the final usable system. Based on the kernel, they autonomously select and package desktop environments, application software, and interfaces to meet the “out-of-the-box” needs of vastly different scenarios, from servers to mobile phones.

React redefined the boundaries of responsibility in front-end development. The core team never attempted to create a full-stack framework covering routing, state management, and styling solutions. They exercised extreme restraint, focusing on one responsibility: providing an efficient, declarative way to build UI. They laid the foundation for building through the component model and Hooks API, supported by excellent documentation. The responsibility for “how to build a complete application” was exchanged with the community. Thus, ecosystem projects like Redux, React Router, and Styled-components flourished. Developers can choose and assemble these parts based on project needs to build the front-end “black box” most suitable for themselves. React’s success lies precisely in not being the “Ultimate Black Box” but becoming the best “White-Box Component Library”.

Kubernetes, as the cornerstone of the cloud-native era, applied the philosophy of Responsibility Exchange to the infrastructure level. Kubernetes itself does not promise to deploy a specific, usable e-commerce website or database. It provides a powerful, universal container orchestration “engine” and a set of declarative APIs. Its responsibility is to ensure the reliability of container scheduling, the extensibility of the system, and to define powerful extension mechanisms like CRDs (Custom Resource Definitions) and their corresponding specifications. The responsibility for “how to use this engine to run my specific service” is entirely handed over to users and the ecosystem. Helm packages applications, Istio manages the service mesh, and various Operators manage stateful applications. Users, like assembling building blocks, autonomously construct highly customized cloud platforms that meet their own operational needs.

I once asked a question like this in the FastAPI community:

I want to know if there is one command for creating fastapi project like create-vue-app and create-react-app.

I think it may be quite useful if I can just type a command and then get all the basic files and codes.

The FastAPI team replied like this:

There is no one “right” file structure.

You can search for existing FastAPI project templates or create your own.

Certainly, my request was a typical “Black-Box Demand”. Its essence was hoping the framework maintainers would provide a standard, complete, immediately usable project “black box”. I would type a command and get a project with best-practice configurations and a basic structure, allowing me to start writing business code immediately without worrying about project structure, build configuration, basic dependencies, and other “trivial matters”. In other words, I expected an out-of-the-box product.

And this collaborator perfectly illustrated the “Responsibility Exchange” philosophy itself:
“There is no one ‘right’ file structure”: Not defining and delivering an “Ultimate Black Box” project template.
Exchanging the responsibility of “building the initial project”: You can search for existing templates or create your own.

Their responsibility is to focus on the stability, performance, API design, and excellent documentation of the FastAPI core framework. They ensure the “building blocks” (i.e., the FastAPI library itself) you use to build are of high quality. The responsibility of users and the community is to, based on their own needs, autonomously choose or create the initial project structure and configuration, achieving the true final implementation.

Therefore, we propose the Responsibility Exchange philosophy here.

We are exploring better ways of collaboration in the open-source world through practice and helping others practice. In this process, we have come to recognize:

• Buildability trumps complete presets: We value providing a solid, extensible core that allows any desired functionality to be added safely, over providing a static finished product containing all features.
• Extension guides are as important as code: Clear guides, examples, and specifications are the user’s license for autonomous building.
• A thriving ecosystem outweighs feature accumulation: We are more committed to enabling the community to easily grow a rich set of extensions, rather than monopolizing the implementation of all features.
• Empowering users, not just serving them: Our ultimate goal is to provide users with all the guarantees to solve their own problems, not to have them forever wait for us to provide solutions.

For Maintainers:

• Design First, for Extensibility: Design the system as a set of well-defined interfaces and contracts, hiding concrete implementations behind them. Plugin systems, middleware pipelines, hooks, and clear API boundaries are not afterthoughts; they are the cornerstones of the architecture.
• Stability is the Highest Commitment: Changes to published public APIs and core behavior must be extremely cautious. Breaking changes require long deprecation cycles, exhaustive migration guides, and transparent communication. Because users’ autonomous builds are based on this, stability is trust.
• Documentation is the Product, Tutorials are the Blueprints: Treat documentation as the project’s “user interface”. It must not only be accurate but also pedagogical. Provide a complete path from “Getting Started” to “Mastery”, including guides from simple examples to advanced patterns. An excellent tutorial is worth a thousand lines of code.
• Nurture the Ecosystem, Define the Boundaries: Have the courage to say “no” to feature requests that don’t align with the core vision, and clearly guide users to use extension mechanisms to implement them themselves or find community solutions. The maintainer’s job is to cultivate the soil, not plant every tree.
• Provide Scaffolding, Not Palaces: It’s acceptable to create project generation tools, but they should be “deconstructable” scaffolding – using interactive options to let users choose needed components (database, cache, authentication, etc.), generating a clear, concise starting point and exposing all configuration entries. Its purpose is to demonstrate ways to combine best practices, not to provide an unmodifiable behemoth.

For Users and Re-developers:

• Embrace the Builder Identity: View the chosen open-source project as a set of advanced Lego bricks, not a finished model. Be prepared to read its extension documentation and invest time learning how to combine and modify it to meet your specific needs.
• Explore First, Request Later: Before asking “Can this feature be added?”, first ask “How can I achieve this with existing tools?”. Consult documentation, search the ecosystem; many problems already have extension-based solutions.
• Contribute Solutions, Not Just Problems: When you successfully solve a specific need using extension mechanisms, consider open-sourcing your implementation. It might help thousands of others in similar situations. Your contribution can be a plugin, a detailed configuration example, or a technical blog post. This is how you enrich the ecosystem you all depend on.
• Understand and Respect the Core’s Focus: The maintainers’ intent to keep the core lean is for the project’s long-term health and everyone’s benefit. Your customization needs are precisely the value of niche existence.

What we exchange is not responsibility itself, but the possibility of creation. We relinquish the fantasy of a perfect but static “product”, yet together we gain an “ecosystem” that can evolve infinitely, continuously adapt, and be full of vitality. This, perhaps, is the most profound gift the open-source spirit gives to the software world, and indeed to all fields of collaboration: True power lies not in what we deliver, but in what we enable others to create.