Open source is not about you (2018)

Re:Open source is not about you (2018) by streaming on Saturday July 02, 2022 @05:55PM (#31962813)

As someone who started and ran a very successful open source project, I feel his pain. You get a large following of adopters, some of whom feel entitled to demand features or priority for bug fixes even though they aren't contributing anything to the project. If they don't get what they want, they start bad-mouthing you in order to bring more pressure. After about 6 months of observing this, I finally had a good discussion with my brilliant Principal Architect, who helped me respond as follows... If you would like a new feature or bug fix, you have the following options; 1 - Improve the code yourself. 2 - Pay someone to improve the code. 3 - Ask nicely, and wait patiently. Or, 4 - Openly criticize the project leads.

If it were me, I wouldn't choose option 4. But that's just me.

Once I posted this to the main forum thread where people discussed the project, most of the participants rallied to support me, and peer pressured in the discussion threads helped keep open source entitlement to a minimum.

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Re:Open source is not about you (2018) by 59nadir on Sunday July 03, 2022 @03:45AM (#31965897)

For context, this rant was inspired by someone who complained that "1. Improve the code yourself" was prohibitively slow and even if you did solve the problem there could be a months/years-long turnaround only for it to be declined:

https://gist.github.com/halgari/c17f378718cbd2fd82324002133e...

I don't think they're wrong that it's not a great way to work for the contributor and I can see why they'd want to write this gist in frustration. They're obviously being mostly fair to the people involved, but think that the process is just tedious and bad for contributors.

So I think you're off base; you're not in fact talking about the same issue here and Hickey is addressing real contributors who are trying to improve the code.

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