Happened to me too with NSIS when a bunch of people threatened to sue me for things they should understand better

https://kichik.com/2006/11/03/mr-smarty-pants/

https://kichik.com/2006/12/02/mr-angry-pants/

https://kichik.com/2006/12/15/nsis-media-remover/

https://kichik.com/2008/02/08/mediacentric/

Less funny, but the creator of curl gets mistaken messages too.

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2021/02/19/i-will-slaughter-you/

That’s a sad story. Mental illness is such a tragedy. The author clearly has a great deal of technical depth shining through which makes it all the more tragic.

This is becoming a scary story thread. This reads like a threat that could actually be carried out. It could end up like the Ebay/EcommerceBytes case or worse.

edit: this turned out to be pretty sad.

Ah man, I miss that sort of early-2000s directness-to-the-point-of-rudeness (not that it was unjustified!). Nobody talks like that online anymore.

Yeah I don't. It seems needlessly inflammatory in those email threads.

You have no idea what you are talking about.

?

I do miss that sort of thing, but these days I would stop responding much, much quicker than I used to.

I guess it's funny in retrospect. I sell my own software and have to deal with these "confidently incorrect" people all too often. Seems like they are either mentally ill or have some kind of sociopathic personality. I'm thinking about quitting the game because of it.

I guess the "smart" thing to do would be to pay someone to deal with these people, but I really don't want to subject anyone else to the abuse. Not to mention that having another person on the payroll shifts the calculus of whether or not it is even worth it.

I thought I'd get used to it. But, after 10 years, it still makes my fight or flight response kick in. Every time.

At least I get paid to take the abuse. I can't imagine having to deal with it for an open source project. I guess it explains why so many open source project maintainers seem so testy.

Thanks for letting me air my grievances. I feel a little better :)

Oh, I have the SysAdmin style of humor because you either laugh or cry. I've sold software and experienced that fun angle to customers. My favorite is still the customer who got confused and blamed me for another vendor's software. It was an interesting e-mail chain. Being a SysAdmin for a number of years has lead to me seeing some of the worst in people.

I used to think these people are mentally ill or sociopaths too, but I think I have come to a much simpler explanation. Steve Jobs was correct about computers being a bicycle for the mind, but I think we need to look at the negative part of that statement too. Computers just emphasis what is already there and a cost of the strengthening / speed is the removal of societal filters.

We grow up learning a bunch of societal filters that we use to take our raw thoughts and make them acceptable to the world around us. Most people get this right. At our hearts, most of us are good people and don't want to cause harm.

Sadly, most people don't really write e-mail, tweets, or posts to another person. They write it to some image in their head where the basic societal filters are no longer operating. Communication is dehumanized and you get the raw person. Sadly, many of our fellow humans are not very pleasant without those learned filters. In fact, they are rather primitive scum. Add to that the voices that say you don't have to be nice or even be humane to "them" for some value of "them" that is not "us" or "me". I really wish there were some fix, but I guess its AH from here on out.