If it's neither written nor explicitly spoken, then it's not a contract of any kind. It's just an - usually naive - expectation.

▲

account42 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

A social contract isn't a legal contract to begin with, but even for those "written or explicitly spoken" is not a hard requirement.

	▲	skeledrew an hour ago \| parent [-]
		A social contract still has to be explicit in some way to be considered such. Otherwise it's just an accepted convention.

▲

dbacar 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It was not expectation when they started, did a lot to lure many into the ecosystem. When you release it free, wait for the momentum to build, then you cut off, it is something else. And the worse is they did it in a very short time. Check out elasticsearch, the same route but did not abandon the 7 release like this.

	▲	skeledrew an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I know all about ElasticSearch, MongoDB, Redis, etc. Yes, what they did sucks. No, it doesn't make the maintainers bad or anything. It's still on the user to know that anything can happen to that spiffy project they've been using for a while, and so be prepared to migrate at any time.