I want to clarify, though, that in talking about the unfortunate number of OSS projects which convey the "if you're here, you need no explanation", I am absolutely not hung up on profit motives.
Instead, I am talking about the times where you are searching for a technical solution with only a vague intuition about the shape of an approach and some faith that it might exist. And you land on a project homepage that contains so little context that the only reasonable reaction is to have serious doubts that you're in the right place.
You're right, I do care. I have spent a huge amount of my life publishing OSS under different licenses and I want people to experience maximum benefit from that effort. It boggles my mind that people work so hard to build useful tools and then appear to actively gaslight potential users into feeling inadequate instead of attempting even the most basic onboarding advice.
Folks are not obligated to make their code or projects accessible, but if you can't justify even a simple "this is why this exists" statement somewhere prominent that conveys intent without inference or telepathy, I believe that they give up their right to grumble that nothing they do matters and nobody cares.
Well, there is an old English proverb that applies here: you don't look a gift horse in the mouth. Obviously OSS writers could in many cases do better at communications. But communicating clearly is a skill that is unfortunately not all that common and there is an interesting thing about the very best programmers that I know: they all seem to excel at dialogue with the machine but only a small fraction of them is equally skilled at dialogue with humans, present or in writing. This creates an obvious and immediate problem: without infrastructure those people are still going to be able to create useful software, various tools and so on, but those tools are going to be bereft of documentation and explanation. This is the case for a large chunk of all open source projects and if you look a bit more closely at this you'll probably find that the most successful open source projects are successful primarily because their creators either had great communications skills (possibly even better than they had software skills) or that they found someone to contribute that skill early on in the project.
So what you are seeing is entirely the expected outcome!
I want to clarify, though, that in talking about the unfortunate number of OSS projects which convey the "if you're here, you need no explanation", I am absolutely not hung up on profit motives.
Instead, I am talking about the times where you are searching for a technical solution with only a vague intuition about the shape of an approach and some faith that it might exist. And you land on a project homepage that contains so little context that the only reasonable reaction is to have serious doubts that you're in the right place.
You're right, I do care. I have spent a huge amount of my life publishing OSS under different licenses and I want people to experience maximum benefit from that effort. It boggles my mind that people work so hard to build useful tools and then appear to actively gaslight potential users into feeling inadequate instead of attempting even the most basic onboarding advice.
Folks are not obligated to make their code or projects accessible, but if you can't justify even a simple "this is why this exists" statement somewhere prominent that conveys intent without inference or telepathy, I believe that they give up their right to grumble that nothing they do matters and nobody cares.