Holy shit. That's just insane.

It feels like some people treat open source developers like government employees. Both provide a seemingly "free" service, and when you're not paying it's easy to ask for more and get upset about trivial things. (Of course neither group deserves this kind of thing.)

>It feels like some people treat open source developers like government employees

This is actually a very interesting comparison.

> Both provide a seemingly "free" service

I'd argue that open source maintainers provide a free service. Government employees do not.

Many prominent open source projects are supported and often initiated by corporations. I imagine Google pays the core Angular team quite well.

Of course. But most of the time users are not paying the maintainers whereas with government employees you are paying them through your taxes.

Well, that's hardly any different to google. You have no control over the details of those taxes. If anything, the advantage you grant google is likely more direct and quite probably more costly if you're comparing apples to apples. It's just really hard to compare those.

Don't forget, google gains quite a lot from giving away software like this, and some of their gain (in the form of control) may well be a cost to others - and it's not a zero sum game, so it's anyones guess whether it's a net positive or negative (even though that seems unlikely).

Similarly, you talk of the paying taxes as if this were some net-negative cost. There too this isn't a zero sum game - just because you distribute the costs but don't account for the benefits doesn't mean it's not net beneficial to you. The government is even larger than google (and indeed intertwined the the semi-fiction of currency), so "paying them" doesn't really mean the costs are much more direct than they are with granting google influence of the JS ecosystem.

Even if through voting you could choose the cease to "pay" for the government employees, the consequences might well be far-reaching and impact the currency system (hence "pay" in quotes), so from one point of view you can't with any reliability choose not to pay, rather, you can choose not to account for costs accrued by a large civilization. But it's highly questionable whether you can actually avoid those costs and remain a large civilization.

I don't know. If you use Google products and see ads, you're indirectly paying for the development of Angular.

Not everyone who uses government services directly pays for them either (they might not have income or it might be less than the required minimum for federal/national tax, for example).

What is wrong with these people? Why do they treat people like this? Why is it these people always seem to jump to the big three [0] in protest of something they don't like? Are they that childish they can't express themselves in a more humane and intelligent way?

One hears about this seemingly regularly. It needs to stop.

[0] Nazi, murder, rape

Thanks for bringing up this example and calling it out as unacceptable. I appreciate it (and I'm sure other OSS maintainers do too).

No problem. It was so egregious and over the line that it really stood out. Your response was also really eye-opening, a thing that all of us who benefit so much from OSS needed to read and understand. Thank you for making it.

Its a dick move clearly but the post was flagged, a hacker news moderator spoke directly to the issue saying the post was unacceptable, various others had a more productive positive discussion including calling out the negative poster.

You can even make a negative, frankly slightly whiny post calling hacker news a trash fire and STILL have a productive discussion here.

The human race is just chock full of assholes and if you make yourself visible by raising your head above the herd you will inevitably become the target for some of them. Each community of course should do what it can to promote a positive asshole free discussion but its still a semi free internet and assholes have email/irc/twitter accounts.

Beyond keeping it positive yourself which the author hasn't done you just have to deal with it and move on. If someone calls you terrible and you look in the mirror and know its not true then shrug it off and move on.

He mentioned getting some egregiously awful comments, specifically over email. I quickly scrolled through the HN thread and didn't see many, not on "nazi" or "death threat" level.

Perhaps the people that read HN and then email other people are not innocent, but there's a huge gap between the number of people who comment on HN and the number of people who just read HN.

I think HN comment posters are generally innocent. I would guess that the storm came from elsewhere, or from particularly unscrupulous people who happen to read HN. Stuff like the mentioned subject ends up bringing out the paranoid people, which often causes some seriously unhinged commentary.

The HN commenter literally threatened to sue the developer, even calling the developer a "good target". That sort of combative language is toxicity.

The response to his comment was immediate, unanimous, and unequivocal.

HN mods responded, the comment was flagged and killed and downvoted to hell.

Also, the way it was written may not have been the way he intended to come across. Read dang's comment, as well as his downthread comment.

All things considered, HN is definitely not a bad place.

The mods did well there, I agree, but it was the top-voted comment for a fair while (most of the working day, European time). Perhaps that says something about European vs. American attitudes on such thing, I dunno (I'm European).

> All things considered, HN is definitely not a bad place.

While I am very critical of many aspects of HN, I have had some excellent discussion here. I just wish it were more consistently good.

I haven't had higher quality discussion with this many people anywhere else on the internet. Sometimes there are not so great comment threads, sometimes people decide to take things too seriously and fail to pick up on humor... but generally I think this is a great place.