Even with the small amount of open source software I've maintained I've gotten all kinds of angry emails and completely useless "bug reports" with no information. It gets exhausting after a while, and I agree that it's hard to just say "I don't care at all" when it happens. At minimum it's a bad look for you professionally if you never actually help maintain your open source software.

Other situations like research, typically need the same materials to do verification of that work.

Of course the problem of research is slightly different, since you have a claim, are trying to be "peer reviewed", and possibly were funded by public money.

Take a look at the issues of any popular Github project to see this phenomenon exacerbated.

Coincidentally I stumbled upon an example today while randomly browsing Github projects. A project with 9k stars and someone opens an issue basically saying: "commands do not work": https://github.com/walkor/Workerman/issues/611

I don't mean to do finger pointing at this person. It's a common behaviour.

For maintainers it's exhausting to pursue each and every issue, asking for context. And if you don't keep a tight leash on them or use a bot they just pile up to hundreds of issues.

My personal experience is that my paid customers have been much friendlier and less demanding than users of things I've put out for free. That's not a problem in and of itself: sometimes demanding users is just what I need to sharpen up myself and what I'm building. Having noticed this, though, I've tried to be more thoughtful about what I put out, in what format, and under what terms.

All that to say: I sympathize with both points of view.

The context for this thread is whether this is an acceptable reason for keeping source closed. It seems from context that you don't believe this is an acceptable reason. You also say that if I can't ignore people that I should turn off my internet, which makes me think that you believe this is an acceptable response.

Thus, I believe that you believe that turning off the internet is a reasonable response and closing my source isn't.

My comment was meant to be hyperbole since I think if you're unable to ignore people online you should really just turn off your internet because it's really easy to ignore people online. I did not mean that you must make your code open source. I don't really care either way about that.

Having aspirations about your project becoming a victim of its own success is good. Overselling your own success before it’s caused you a single issue is probably not good.

It was an amazing amount of ugly drama to try to talk to others with my condition about what I do and what I think about why it probably works. And then people would take very conservative bits of advice that were the most well established and screw them up to an amazing degree.

One example: Coconut oil is a very well established beneficial supplement for my condition that is medically recommended and this is common knowledge for the CF community. It also tends to cause diarrhea.

So "on my advice", someone began giving their toddler like a freaking tablespoon of coconut oil per day -- which is insane amounts to give -- and the result was very extreme amounts of diarrhea that couldn't be contained by a diaper and resulted in the floor needing to be mopped (like every single day until she finally said something to me and I was like "That's waaaay too much coconut oil to give").

So, ultimately, I left all the lists and I still write about what I do for my health, but I've worked hard at figuring out how to talk about things to a lay audience knowing that some of them can manage to do amazingly stupid and harmful things with the most conservative suggestions. And I mostly don't have an audience for that kind of writing and I'm okay with that. Go have your dumpster fire elsewhere and don't try to pin the blame on me, thanks.

Code no doubt has some people like that. And there's a crazy amount of built in assumptions that the original author will know but may not know he "needs" to document and spell out explicitly so some random internet stranger doesn't create some dumpster fire and claim it's someone else's fault because "no one told me...!"

And no amount of "use at your own risk" type language is enough to protect you from crazies who want something for free, aren't competent enough to effectively deploy it and now think that freebie owes them like they paid good money and it came with a warranty.

If you want to make absolutely sure the "crazies" don't get any bad ideas from you, the only way is to not publish anything at all.

Yes, any time you publish anything at all, you risk having someone misuse it. But someone who replicates a thing and messes it up where you didn't provide the source code is less likely to act like "you did this to me, you evil monster, you." More importantly, the rest of the world is less likely to hold you responsible.

Publishing A and publishing B don't come with equal risks. He is choosing to mitigate risks for reasons that make sense to him in areas that matter to him and explaining it on his blog.

You can feel however you feel about that, but he has a right to make those distinctions and choices whether you like it or not.

Irony, incarnate.