> If I give you a puppy, and it gets sick, should the vet bill me?
> If I gave you a car, and the wheels fall off two years later, is that my problem?
So in Western culture there's this notion that a gift creates no further obligations. The recipient should just be happy he got what he got and not expect anything more. As if to say, at least you didn't get nothing, you can still get nothing, you want nothing?
I would say with the puppy if it gets sick and the recipient can't afford it, you should accept paying the bill. Before it was the "giftee's" puppy, it was your puppy for some small amount of time after you got it and before you gave it. Surely when you gave me a puppy you expected me to be able to keep it alive, right? And as for the car, it's not right to give someone a car whose maintenance they can't afford. The puppy and the car are two excellent examples of gifts that cannot be given without forming a relationship between the giver and the receiver.
On the other hand a gift you can give and split and that's it is food or money. Just handing money to a beggar, he might ask for more, and you can walk.
In some African cultures it's more like, if you do me a favor, do me another favor, and then we're true blue and you can rely on me to help you in return, but never in a tit-for-tat manner. It's in the book Debt: The First 5000 Years.
The software library in question wasn’t gifted. It was made open/available for re-use from a library.
The person who chose to put it into _their_ code took ownership of its ongoing maintenance in their instance of its usage (presumably because they felt that would be less work than entirely diy).
It's prudent to decline a gift if one doesn't really have the circumstance to accept it responsibly. As in the case of a puppy. Or an offered position. (Eg. if someone shows up at your doorstep and gifts you a military rank and accepting that would make people to expect you to go and lead them in battle.)
But a car is not a liability. They can sell it. It won't "go bad like a puppy" if it just sits in a garage.
A car is a liability. And it does go bad if it sits in the garage, the tires, the battery dies...Plus the space it takes up. Maybe if you didn't have that car in your garage you could do something interesting with that garage, like form Hewlett-Packard or Apple? I expect there wasn't a car in those garages. So it takes up space, about the same as what you need to house someone, and if you want to sell it you I suppose have to drive it...no I guess you're right in that regard, you can show it to people until you sell it. But it's better to regift it, so you're not responsible for harm that could come from bad condition, in fact come to think if there's no trust it might itself be a regift. Yeah, it's a liability.
Worst case scenario, you can throw the car away. You had no car before receiving it as a gift, you'll be not worse off if you throw it away. The dog is a little worse because you may become attached and in general, you can't really treat animals like objects in our society.
You can get it towed to a junkyard and they will even pay you a little bit for it, probably enough to at least pay for the towing costs. Otherwise, I’m sure you can arrange something with your council.
Is that true? I would expect that most junkyards would charge you both for towing and scrapping the car.
(Granted, nowadays, due to the supply chain issues and component shortages, people will pay an arm and a leg for a car that even barely runs, so there's that.)
They won't tow it for you. But they will usually pay for your car if it's in any reasonable condition, though not a lot. Maybe it's different in different countries
You can still sell the parts years and years later. No garage necessary. No driver's license required. If someone gives you a car unless it's a total junk you can easily convert it to money, and the time pressure is completely different compared to a pet.
The moment you accept the pet you have to think about everything in your future for years. You accept a car? Okay, you might not even see it, maybe you just get a paper and a key fob and an address. And you don't have to do anything for years. Nothing happens morally.
> If I gave you a car, and the wheels fall off two years later, is that my problem?
So in Western culture there's this notion that a gift creates no further obligations. The recipient should just be happy he got what he got and not expect anything more. As if to say, at least you didn't get nothing, you can still get nothing, you want nothing?
I would say with the puppy if it gets sick and the recipient can't afford it, you should accept paying the bill. Before it was the "giftee's" puppy, it was your puppy for some small amount of time after you got it and before you gave it. Surely when you gave me a puppy you expected me to be able to keep it alive, right? And as for the car, it's not right to give someone a car whose maintenance they can't afford. The puppy and the car are two excellent examples of gifts that cannot be given without forming a relationship between the giver and the receiver.
On the other hand a gift you can give and split and that's it is food or money. Just handing money to a beggar, he might ask for more, and you can walk.
In some African cultures it's more like, if you do me a favor, do me another favor, and then we're true blue and you can rely on me to help you in return, but never in a tit-for-tat manner. It's in the book Debt: The First 5000 Years.