This is a problem unique to Open Source because the root problem itself is baked into OSS and Free Software.
The very foundation of Free Software is the idea that a user can do whatever they like, are given the source code, and pass those freedoms on to their users. There are no protections offered to the developer, and that is not a bug it's the explicit point of the model.
There are advantages and disadvantages to this model. But the model is what it is.
Word Press is unhappy that WP Engine is using the software exactly as the license allows.
Drupal has created a parallel organisation which monitors and rewards participation. This doesn't "solve" the problem, it just adds a commercial and administrative layer.
Proprietary software solved the problem by not being Open Source. Others have adopted a "source available" license, which may come with restrictions.
In other words, lots of people have solved the problem simply by not being "open source" (not necessarily by closing the source, but rather by restricting usage.)
Word Press are picking a fight with a user, who is using it exactly as they licensed it.
If Word Press don't like the rules of the game then they can change the rules. That is 100% under their control. But don't use the "common rule book" then complain when the other team plays to the rules.
More people should try splitting the difference with source available licenses that turn into GPL after a year. The point of open source was to change the balance of power from developer to user, it was not an economic system. Theres plenty of room in the middle to balance interests without resorting to predatory proprietary licenses.
The only workable way to fund software development is for users to pay. The idea is that if the user, after some time, can take the source to a new development team then both parties are invested in continuing the relationship in a stable way unlike proprietary licenses where the incentive is to squeeze to the users limit. It also solves the abandonware issue.
If the majority of the code and functionality is written by WordPress, Having a little GPL component in there will not affect them to change the license. GPL's idea of infecting copyright with small libraries is a convention. I don't think it will hold in an actual court that will test who wrote what at what degree of substance.
Did the little GPL component force itself into the codebase without anyone noticing? Was it so useless that nobody could have removed it from the project to get rid of this obvious parasite?
I think it will hold in court specifically because, since it is so aggressive in what it is set to do, a company choosing to use it in their otherwise non-GPL codebase is declaring that it is not easily replaceable and thus proving it contributes to the overall value.
> Word Press is unhappy that WP Engine is using the software exactly as the license allows.
Maybe, but they seem to be basing their legal argument on trademarks, that WPE is using the same WordPress and WooCommerce labels as the labels on the primary maintainer's services based on the upstream code base, when, according to them, the downstream forks of pieces of this are not the same service and WPE doesn't have rights to that trade dress.
In addition to the methods you talk about, trademarks are another method of "solving the problem".
Although I agree with what you say, that seems to be mischaricterising the blog post - he is talking about the community rather than the software.
It is a bit like free speech and ideologies like communism. Do I support the right of people to spread communist messages? Yes. Do I support them in doing so? No. Indeed, I would pick a fight with them on the subject - it just happens that suppressing them by censorship is a bad strategy. Similarly, the Drupal Association seems to be supporting the general freedom of all software users but the people it actually supports is a much smaller group.
The specifics might not work, but building a community isn't related to the license of a piece of software.
So you would physically fight someone over political speech? That doesn’t seem to respect their right to it. Curious why you’d choose to harp on communist ideology when there are real live Nazis again.
bruce511's comment included "Word Press are picking a fight with a user, who is using it exactly as they licensed it". In this comment the word "fight" means to write a blog post calling them parasites and maybe have some legal arguments.
I could imagine a checkbox with something like "participates in the development of the Software" as a criterion for selecting vendors. I'm amazed they got it to be an absolute for a government body, I think it likely would not be legal in Europe.
this is not a new problem; peter deutsch was very annoyed in the 90s about linux distributions distributing outdated, and often modified, copies of ghostscript, whose users would then complain to him about their bugs. compounding the problem in his case: virtually nobody else was capable of contributing third-party code that was up to his quality standards; for context, he'd written i think the second or third implementation of lisp, in assembly language, when he was 15, some 30 years earlier, and hadn't stopped honing his craft since then, for example inventing jit compilers
ultimately i think the answer is to limit your interactions with the takers; some of them may become makers later, often of different free software than yours†, but most of them won't. they may provide useful feedback (bug reports, feature requests, etc.) but most of them will not. what's important is preventing them from overrunning spaces where the makers are collaborating (and especially harassing makers into quitting), and maybe to give them a path toward growing into makers, if they are so inclined. dries's system seems like a gentle, probably sufficient way to do that
______
† the contributors to vim mostly don't contribute code or bug reports to gcc, and the gcc maintainers mostly don't contribute code or bug reports to vim, but they each benefit from the others' work. similarly, many linux distributors eventually became important indirect contributors to ghostscript development, even though at first peter wasn't using linux, and i think even today very little of the code is contributed by outsiders
I don't really understand the premise of these types of write-ups — the software has a license, and people and companies use it accordingly.
I understand most core software was started long ago as a one-person project and given a FOSS license. Due to the license, it grew from the work of hundreds or thousands who contributed, but the license no longer serves the authors' worldview.
It seems to me all the contributors implicitly approve of this situation, as they contribute labor while knowing what the license is.
I think the article clearly states the problem: It encourages contributors to stop contributing and become "takers", and once there are not enough makers, the product and entire ecosystem dies. A classic tragedy of the commons.
Except software is infinitely reproducible once written. There's no tragedy of the commons if the commons' resources are infinte.
"But code needs to constantly change and update all the time! Who's going to do that!?" -- well, maybe that's the problem. Maybe if we want to make a real, lasting contribution to OSS, without being stuck maintaining it forever, we should focus on making software that doesn't have to change. Code is basically math, and we get lots of use out of polynomials and complex numbers and Galois theory without anyone actively "maintaining" them. Galois died in 1832!
Maybe the software we're writing is trying to do too much; maybe we should stop expecting perpetual updates and maintenance of OSS? Maybe a small, focused, reliable library that does one thing really well and never gets updated is actually the perfect OSS?
> maybe we should stop expecting perpetual updates and maintenance of OSS? Maybe a small, focused, reliable library that does one thing really well and never gets updated is actually the perfect OSS?
This is something that took some getting use to working with clojure. You'll hear it a lot, a lot of libraries are simply "done". They do their thing and they do it well. The language itself prioritizes not making breaking changes so there is rarely a need to "maintain" many libraries that were last updated years ago.
Habit still makes me pause when seeing it, but looking through the code will usually be reassurance enough or tell you that it was abandoned and needs work. There is also CLJ Commons[0] that takes useful/popular libraries that are done/mostly done and no longer maintained by the original maintainers. Usually the only changes are some performance updates with new JVM/Clojure features. Many of them are incredibly useful and haven't been updated in months or years.
It's definitely not a tragedy of the commons problem. Open source doesn't get used up by more people using it.
Takers actually have an inherent interest in supporting the open source software they use, in direct proportion to the long-term value they derive from it.
You actually need some countervailing force to have significant takers. E.g, with Wordpress I think there's an acrimonious and competitive relationship between the for-profit company controlling the open source project and one of the big for-profit users of the project.
The tragedy for OSS here is that an OSS project is being used as a lever in a struggle between business competitors over who gets the dollars. (I suspect WordPress was always designed and intended to support a commercial enterprise, though, so this kind thing was probably always going to be part of it.)
> once there are not enough makers, the product and entire ecosystem dies
Once there are not enough makers, willing to license products to corporations for free, the corporations either have to write their own software or die.
The “tragedy” as commonly interpreted is so wrong-headed and ill-framed. The problem at the heart of it was always the intermingling of private interests and common goods. The biggest problem with OSS is exactly that: private corporations can take those commons and get rich based on them.
So what is the tragedy? Really? It’s the tragedy of private interests. But it’s of course not named that because Economists championed The Problem. In turn we have to pretend that The Commons have a problem. Because Private Interests are axiomatic and are not to be questioned.
I don't see this issue at all. I put a BSD license on it so you can do whatever you want. Get rich with it; steer missiles at civilian targets with it; whatever.
Building a business with the help of someone else's open source isn't some zero effort, turn-key event. Those people still hustle and take risks.
* There's nothing wrong per se with being a Taker - (assuming a broad definition of "profit") the vast majority of individual users certainly fall into this category. The problem is only when the Taker's actions harm the Maker ecosystem.
* Regarding a credit system, one problem that jumps out at me is - how do you quantify work on a plugin? Do you attempt to scale by what fraction of users uses that plugin? What about a plugin that's widely used, but many of its users are customers of your hosting company?
There's also the fact that the majority of big wordpress plugins are "freemium", with most features locked behind a paywall, that includes Automattic's own plugins like jetpack.
There's some cognitive dissonance to me about using Ayn Rand's words about open-source efforts. What seems to be missing from both forms of discourse is this nagging term "public good". That is, if you're doing what you're doing to make the world a better place, you wouldn't be so incentivized to keep score about who's benefiting more.
I don't disagree with the author's ideas about how to create an incentive structure that finds alternate means of benefiting those who have gone out of their way to contribute. I just think framing it the way he did comes across as a little pecuniary.
> What seems to be missing from both forms of discourse is this nagging term "public good".
The term is in the article:
Our approach stems from a key insight, also explained in my Makers and Takers blog post: customers are a "common good" for an open source project, not a "public good".
Only rich people can think in terms of public good. Rest of us pheasants needs to put food on the table.
There is difference between childless google employee maintaining open source library as side hustle and someone running company building Drupal sites for a living in India.
as a poor person, i greatly appreciate public goods such as the public park down the street, the sidewalks that take me there, the public order that kept me from getting stabbed the last time i was successfully robbed, wikipedia, linux, firefox, and library genesis
i contribute to them by, among other things, not littering in the park, editing wikipedia, and publishing my software as free software
Where does the land of "la unica solución" seem to be heading? Are you more likely to wind up with somewhat more protection from robbery, getting robbed at chainsaw-point (beats getting dropped out of a helicopter), or somewhere in between?
[we had someone in recently who seemed very well educated for taking a job as a cuidador de caballos, but it turned out to be dual purpose: during the 6-month visa we could arrange, he managed (in surprisingly few physical trips) to do all the italian bureaucracy wrangling he'd needed to get their passport]
Does this really solve the problem? The article doesn’t really provide statistics, but why would WP Engine suddenly increase contributions to get listed on the WordPress homepage? Is that an important marketing tool for them?
Some Drupal users only contracting with contributors likely does solve a lot of the problem. How they made that happen, I don't know.
The marketing surely also helps, not sure how relevant it is for WP Engine though and how willing WordPress would be to do that given the very direct competition with Automattic.
It's the software developer equivalent of - I will make a post on my Instagram (50,000 followers) if you give me a free holiday - "influencer" request.
Yeah, it really requires a whole specific culture of the community, which Wordpress did not build over the decades, and Drupal did. It's not a system, but a long culture-bending process to implement this to full effect
Drupal best this drum every conference and summit for decades
This all stems from people of certain backgrounds expecting everyone to be a good citizen, more or less.
If your intentions are not clearly spelled out somewhere, then somebody is absolutely going to use your thing in a way that you did not intend.
What complicates matters even further is that the original license reflected some youthful idealism and optimism. In the meantime the maintainer(s) worldview evolved but they forgot to encode that in a new license. Pretty classic mistake, it seems.
Less idealism and more formalities solve that problem. Mostly. Though good luck suing the big companies if they violate the license.
Well I am not a sociologist or a professional psychologist, I am sharing what I've seen many times is all. But let's just say: somewhat privileged white Western men. They seem to think everyone operates on goodwill.
I am a white guy, though from Eastern Europe. Happily most of us suffer no illusions about the benevolence of the world at large.
I don't think this expectation is a consequence of race or ethnicity, but a consequence of seeing it work in one's own local society. (Privilege, in a generic sense of socio-economic status, probably does play into that. It's easier to have high trust when nobody is desperate.)
Indeed it's not a question of race and ethnicity per se, but it's also true that historically such communities that demonstrate a bit of a privileged mindset are mostly white (with some rich Asians here and there).
Privilege stems from community as you alluded to. Many people's worst problem was to ask a new neighbor to turn down the music 1-2 times until they learned to be a good citizen of the neighborhood and that was that. Some of us however had to deal with much worse situations -- on a regular basis -- and for people like myself I really find it difficult to sympathize with OP because coldly and mathematically speaking, they simply did not cover their bases, and they had signs and signals that they should have done it.
This is a problem unique to Open Source because the root problem itself is baked into OSS and Free Software.
The very foundation of Free Software is the idea that a user can do whatever they like, are given the source code, and pass those freedoms on to their users. There are no protections offered to the developer, and that is not a bug it's the explicit point of the model.
There are advantages and disadvantages to this model. But the model is what it is.
Word Press is unhappy that WP Engine is using the software exactly as the license allows.
Drupal has created a parallel organisation which monitors and rewards participation. This doesn't "solve" the problem, it just adds a commercial and administrative layer.
Proprietary software solved the problem by not being Open Source. Others have adopted a "source available" license, which may come with restrictions.
In other words, lots of people have solved the problem simply by not being "open source" (not necessarily by closing the source, but rather by restricting usage.)
Word Press are picking a fight with a user, who is using it exactly as they licensed it.
If Word Press don't like the rules of the game then they can change the rules. That is 100% under their control. But don't use the "common rule book" then complain when the other team plays to the rules.
More people should try splitting the difference with source available licenses that turn into GPL after a year. The point of open source was to change the balance of power from developer to user, it was not an economic system. Theres plenty of room in the middle to balance interests without resorting to predatory proprietary licenses.
The only workable way to fund software development is for users to pay. The idea is that if the user, after some time, can take the source to a new development team then both parties are invested in continuing the relationship in a stable way unlike proprietary licenses where the incentive is to squeeze to the users limit. It also solves the abandonware issue.
They can't change the rules of the game because WordPress itself is a fork. [0]
This is GPL working exactly as it's designed to do, ensuring whoever forks the software must allow others to do the same.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress
If the majority of the code and functionality is written by WordPress, Having a little GPL component in there will not affect them to change the license. GPL's idea of infecting copyright with small libraries is a convention. I don't think it will hold in an actual court that will test who wrote what at what degree of substance.
Did the little GPL component force itself into the codebase without anyone noticing? Was it so useless that nobody could have removed it from the project to get rid of this obvious parasite?
I think it will hold in court specifically because, since it is so aggressive in what it is set to do, a company choosing to use it in their otherwise non-GPL codebase is declaring that it is not easily replaceable and thus proving it contributes to the overall value.
> Word Press is unhappy that WP Engine is using the software exactly as the license allows.
Maybe, but they seem to be basing their legal argument on trademarks, that WPE is using the same WordPress and WooCommerce labels as the labels on the primary maintainer's services based on the upstream code base, when, according to them, the downstream forks of pieces of this are not the same service and WPE doesn't have rights to that trade dress.
In addition to the methods you talk about, trademarks are another method of "solving the problem".
Although I agree with what you say, that seems to be mischaricterising the blog post - he is talking about the community rather than the software.
It is a bit like free speech and ideologies like communism. Do I support the right of people to spread communist messages? Yes. Do I support them in doing so? No. Indeed, I would pick a fight with them on the subject - it just happens that suppressing them by censorship is a bad strategy. Similarly, the Drupal Association seems to be supporting the general freedom of all software users but the people it actually supports is a much smaller group.
The specifics might not work, but building a community isn't related to the license of a piece of software.
So you would physically fight someone over political speech? That doesn’t seem to respect their right to it. Curious why you’d choose to harp on communist ideology when there are real live Nazis again.
bruce511's comment included "Word Press are picking a fight with a user, who is using it exactly as they licensed it". In this comment the word "fight" means to write a blog post calling them parasites and maybe have some legal arguments.
This is the most amazing part for me:
> Drupal users like Pfizer and the State of Georgia only allow Makers to apply in their vendor selection process.
I wonder how they managed to convince companies to add such a requirement, but it's amazing!
I could imagine a checkbox with something like "participates in the development of the Software" as a criterion for selecting vendors. I'm amazed they got it to be an absolute for a government body, I think it likely would not be legal in Europe.
It's pretty dirty. Yikes.
this is not a new problem; peter deutsch was very annoyed in the 90s about linux distributions distributing outdated, and often modified, copies of ghostscript, whose users would then complain to him about their bugs. compounding the problem in his case: virtually nobody else was capable of contributing third-party code that was up to his quality standards; for context, he'd written i think the second or third implementation of lisp, in assembly language, when he was 15, some 30 years earlier, and hadn't stopped honing his craft since then, for example inventing jit compilers
ultimately i think the answer is to limit your interactions with the takers; some of them may become makers later, often of different free software than yours†, but most of them won't. they may provide useful feedback (bug reports, feature requests, etc.) but most of them will not. what's important is preventing them from overrunning spaces where the makers are collaborating (and especially harassing makers into quitting), and maybe to give them a path toward growing into makers, if they are so inclined. dries's system seems like a gentle, probably sufficient way to do that
______
† the contributors to vim mostly don't contribute code or bug reports to gcc, and the gcc maintainers mostly don't contribute code or bug reports to vim, but they each benefit from the others' work. similarly, many linux distributors eventually became important indirect contributors to ghostscript development, even though at first peter wasn't using linux, and i think even today very little of the code is contributed by outsiders
I don't really understand the premise of these types of write-ups — the software has a license, and people and companies use it accordingly. I understand most core software was started long ago as a one-person project and given a FOSS license. Due to the license, it grew from the work of hundreds or thousands who contributed, but the license no longer serves the authors' worldview. It seems to me all the contributors implicitly approve of this situation, as they contribute labor while knowing what the license is.
I think the article clearly states the problem: It encourages contributors to stop contributing and become "takers", and once there are not enough makers, the product and entire ecosystem dies. A classic tragedy of the commons.
> A classic tragedy of the commons.
Except software is infinitely reproducible once written. There's no tragedy of the commons if the commons' resources are infinte.
"But code needs to constantly change and update all the time! Who's going to do that!?" -- well, maybe that's the problem. Maybe if we want to make a real, lasting contribution to OSS, without being stuck maintaining it forever, we should focus on making software that doesn't have to change. Code is basically math, and we get lots of use out of polynomials and complex numbers and Galois theory without anyone actively "maintaining" them. Galois died in 1832!
Maybe the software we're writing is trying to do too much; maybe we should stop expecting perpetual updates and maintenance of OSS? Maybe a small, focused, reliable library that does one thing really well and never gets updated is actually the perfect OSS?
> maybe we should stop expecting perpetual updates and maintenance of OSS? Maybe a small, focused, reliable library that does one thing really well and never gets updated is actually the perfect OSS?
This is something that took some getting use to working with clojure. You'll hear it a lot, a lot of libraries are simply "done". They do their thing and they do it well. The language itself prioritizes not making breaking changes so there is rarely a need to "maintain" many libraries that were last updated years ago.
Habit still makes me pause when seeing it, but looking through the code will usually be reassurance enough or tell you that it was abandoned and needs work. There is also CLJ Commons[0] that takes useful/popular libraries that are done/mostly done and no longer maintained by the original maintainers. Usually the only changes are some performance updates with new JVM/Clojure features. Many of them are incredibly useful and haven't been updated in months or years.
[0] https://clj-commons.org
It's definitely not a tragedy of the commons problem. Open source doesn't get used up by more people using it.
Takers actually have an inherent interest in supporting the open source software they use, in direct proportion to the long-term value they derive from it.
You actually need some countervailing force to have significant takers. E.g, with Wordpress I think there's an acrimonious and competitive relationship between the for-profit company controlling the open source project and one of the big for-profit users of the project.
The tragedy for OSS here is that an OSS project is being used as a lever in a struggle between business competitors over who gets the dollars. (I suspect WordPress was always designed and intended to support a commercial enterprise, though, so this kind thing was probably always going to be part of it.)
> once there are not enough makers, the product and entire ecosystem dies
Once there are not enough makers, willing to license products to corporations for free, the corporations either have to write their own software or die.
A classic tragedy of the billionaires.
The “tragedy” as commonly interpreted is so wrong-headed and ill-framed. The problem at the heart of it was always the intermingling of private interests and common goods. The biggest problem with OSS is exactly that: private corporations can take those commons and get rich based on them.
So what is the tragedy? Really? It’s the tragedy of private interests. But it’s of course not named that because Economists championed The Problem. In turn we have to pretend that The Commons have a problem. Because Private Interests are axiomatic and are not to be questioned.
I don't see this issue at all. I put a BSD license on it so you can do whatever you want. Get rich with it; steer missiles at civilian targets with it; whatever.
Building a business with the help of someone else's open source isn't some zero effort, turn-key event. Those people still hustle and take risks.
Two immediate thoughts on this:
* There's nothing wrong per se with being a Taker - (assuming a broad definition of "profit") the vast majority of individual users certainly fall into this category. The problem is only when the Taker's actions harm the Maker ecosystem.
* Regarding a credit system, one problem that jumps out at me is - how do you quantify work on a plugin? Do you attempt to scale by what fraction of users uses that plugin? What about a plugin that's widely used, but many of its users are customers of your hosting company?
> how do you quantify work on a plugin
There's also the fact that the majority of big wordpress plugins are "freemium", with most features locked behind a paywall, that includes Automattic's own plugins like jetpack.
There's some cognitive dissonance to me about using Ayn Rand's words about open-source efforts. What seems to be missing from both forms of discourse is this nagging term "public good". That is, if you're doing what you're doing to make the world a better place, you wouldn't be so incentivized to keep score about who's benefiting more.
I don't disagree with the author's ideas about how to create an incentive structure that finds alternate means of benefiting those who have gone out of their way to contribute. I just think framing it the way he did comes across as a little pecuniary.
> What seems to be missing from both forms of discourse is this nagging term "public good".
The term is in the article:
Our approach stems from a key insight, also explained in my Makers and Takers blog post: customers are a "common good" for an open source project, not a "public good".
Only rich people can think in terms of public good. Rest of us pheasants needs to put food on the table.
There is difference between childless google employee maintaining open source library as side hustle and someone running company building Drupal sites for a living in India.
And worse, we pheasants are in constant danger of being eaten by starving peasants.
It’s important, as pheasants, that we maintain presence of mind around peasants, lest we become holiday meal presents.
as a poor person, i greatly appreciate public goods such as the public park down the street, the sidewalks that take me there, the public order that kept me from getting stabbed the last time i was successfully robbed, wikipedia, linux, firefox, and library genesis
i contribute to them by, among other things, not littering in the park, editing wikipedia, and publishing my software as free software
Where does the land of "la unica solución" seem to be heading? Are you more likely to wind up with somewhat more protection from robbery, getting robbed at chainsaw-point (beats getting dropped out of a helicopter), or somewhere in between?
Lagniappe: https://d22fxaf9t8d39k.cloudfront.net/bfaefbf26f795ff226ff08...
[we had someone in recently who seemed very well educated for taking a job as a cuidador de caballos, but it turned out to be dual purpose: during the 6-month visa we could arrange, he managed (in surprisingly few physical trips) to do all the italian bureaucracy wrangling he'd needed to get their passport]
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=907381
Is the sage skeptical of education eg
(Carleton again, the hidden fortress?)
> childless Google employee
yikes
They might prefer *childfree.
Does this really solve the problem? The article doesn’t really provide statistics, but why would WP Engine suddenly increase contributions to get listed on the WordPress homepage? Is that an important marketing tool for them?
Some Drupal users only contracting with contributors likely does solve a lot of the problem. How they made that happen, I don't know.
The marketing surely also helps, not sure how relevant it is for WP Engine though and how willing WordPress would be to do that given the very direct competition with Automattic.
It's the software developer equivalent of - I will make a post on my Instagram (50,000 followers) if you give me a free holiday - "influencer" request.
Yeah, it really requires a whole specific culture of the community, which Wordpress did not build over the decades, and Drupal did. It's not a system, but a long culture-bending process to implement this to full effect
Drupal best this drum every conference and summit for decades
The title made me think this was about market makers and takers.
This all stems from people of certain backgrounds expecting everyone to be a good citizen, more or less.
If your intentions are not clearly spelled out somewhere, then somebody is absolutely going to use your thing in a way that you did not intend.
What complicates matters even further is that the original license reflected some youthful idealism and optimism. In the meantime the maintainer(s) worldview evolved but they forgot to encode that in a new license. Pretty classic mistake, it seems.
Less idealism and more formalities solve that problem. Mostly. Though good luck suing the big companies if they violate the license.
"Certain backgrounds"? Any particular examples?
Well I am not a sociologist or a professional psychologist, I am sharing what I've seen many times is all. But let's just say: somewhat privileged white Western men. They seem to think everyone operates on goodwill.
I am a white guy, though from Eastern Europe. Happily most of us suffer no illusions about the benevolence of the world at large.
I don't think this expectation is a consequence of race or ethnicity, but a consequence of seeing it work in one's own local society. (Privilege, in a generic sense of socio-economic status, probably does play into that. It's easier to have high trust when nobody is desperate.)
Indeed it's not a question of race and ethnicity per se, but it's also true that historically such communities that demonstrate a bit of a privileged mindset are mostly white (with some rich Asians here and there).
Privilege stems from community as you alluded to. Many people's worst problem was to ask a new neighbor to turn down the music 1-2 times until they learned to be a good citizen of the neighborhood and that was that. Some of us however had to deal with much worse situations -- on a regular basis -- and for people like myself I really find it difficult to sympathize with OP because coldly and mathematically speaking, they simply did not cover their bases, and they had signs and signals that they should have done it.
This seems far wordier than necessary for the point it's making, and reads to me as AI-generated or at least assisted.