I would expect professionalism from someone I'm paying. I don't expect professionalism from someone who's basically giving me free stuff.

If someone offers to paint your fence for free, and your fence has some really nasty angles at some point, would you say the volunteer was unprofessional if they said "yeah I'm not going to paint that part"?

There is a certain level of just being a decent human being though. If I am an unpaid pastor of a church, should I give crappy sermons?

In what way is Sir_Cmpwn's work "crappy"?

Guess what: if you ask your local Catholic priest to give sermons for your weird sect, he'll probably refuse too. And if lots of people keep insisting, it's not surprising he gets annoyed.

> I don't expect professionalism from someone who's basically giving me free stuff.

Ironically, that's exactly what Microsoft has been saying about Linux during those bad old days. Linux was successful because its developers didn't say "If you want to talk to a professional, buy something else."

I'm not saying an OSS developer should bend over and take abuse from users. But I believe there's a line between that and calling users "entitled brats" just because they use vendor-supplied drivers for their $500 cards.

No, he's calling his users "entitled brats" because they come into his channel and bitch and whine and demand he support them... for free.

After the post and all his comments here I have my doubts that "bitch and whine" isn't actually "people ask me questions, I realize that they use Nvidia so their questions are by definition whining and bitching."

You're certainly entitled to your opinion, but as someone who has actually maintained widely-used open source software, you'd likely be shocked at the level of entitlement I've encountered among OSS users.

>Ironically, that's exactly what Microsoft has been saying about Linux during those bad old days. Linux was successful because its developers didn't say "If you want to talk to a professional, buy something else."

Except, the reason why Microsoft was wrong was that Red Hat existed. If you're running CentOS or Arch Linux or something, you really are fucked as a business. The key distinction here is that SirCmpwn is not a Red Hat dev, so should not be expected to meet the responsibilities of one.

> I don't expect professionalism from someone who's basically giving me free stuff.

That's weird. Professionalism should be expected in all aspects of life. That's basic human respect.

It is an excellent excuse for not devoting a huge amount of time and effort to fixing other people's stuff, though.

Not being paid for something is pretty much the literal definition of not being a professional.

So you define volunteers as unprofessional by definition. That doens't sound right.

It is an off handed snark based on the not terribly subtle difference between "not a professional" and "unprofessional" which I feel perfectly validated making because Sway isn't a volunteer effort, it is an (un|insufficiently) paid effort, which is also not a very subtle difference.

Wasn't aware that disassembling other people's broken code in your own free time for their benefit was a key part of being """professional""".

It isn't, but being a professional does suggest a basic level of respectfulness and composure. Going on a profanity-laden rant against a popular vendor and its users would seem to fall short of that.

On the other hand, a polite refusal to support EGLStreams may not have moved the needle enough to reach the front page of HN.

You know, I'm tired of being respectful and composed while others are walking all over me. If Nvidia doesn't care enough about the OS I bought their card for, fuck them, they suck, and I'm not buying another one of their cards again. I'm tired of being polite and not rocking the boat while I'm being taken advantage of.

It's one thing to be a jerk to Nvidia, which seems justifiable. It's another thing to be a jerk to Nvidia users who may simply be unaware of the harm their GPU vendor has done.

I think it's perfectly understandable (and perhaps even useful) to lose your composure when you have a bunch of users who act entitled and complain about your (free) software being "broken", when it's the fault of their GPU vendor, who makes a ton of money off their user base.

It seems like a big problem for the Wayland ecosystem that support for a large category of video cards depends on one volunteer.

>support for a large category of video cards depends on one volunteer.

How did you come to that conclusion? SirCmpwn doesn't maintain Wayland Nvidia support, just the Sway Compositor. If you want a Wayland compositor that supports Nvidia-proprietary, you can use GNOME.

The last time Sway came up as a topic at HN there was a conversation about whether a particular terminal manager was compatible with it yet. It seems to me that if the applications you use can have compatibility issues with the compositor you use, if you want to use an application your choice of compositors will be necessarily restrained to those that are compatible. And if compositors can be compatible or incompatible with particular hardware, that means that it's possible to have an application you want to use that is only compatible with compositors that are incompatible with your hardware.

What am I missing?

It doesn't. Support for that large category of video cards depends on the manufacturer of those video cards.

Is he being a jerk because he doesn't want to do a bunch of unpaid work? If your car manufacturer doesn't want to fix your broken car, am I a jerk for not doing it for them?

No, but you are a jerk if you tell people who want to use your software to "fuck off" or buy a different car.

Did he tell the people that? Or Nvidia? I must have missed it, if it was the former.

SirCmpwn has a patreon. If you feel the need to help pay for him to develop a feature, you can. He can't maintain everything especially with the hardware working against him.

https://www.patreon.com/sircmpwn

By that logic, I hope you cook only professional-grade food, and exercise like a professional athlete.

That is some heavy BS logic.