I don't think it's even just that, it seems to be something about the price.
I work on a piece of closed-source free software, and we consistently get support requests from unbelievably entitled assholes. The worst of them are the ones that have some technical knowledge; they will not only demand things be fixed or implemented, they make completely erroneous statements about how easy it would be to fix/implement with the conviction that they are 100% correct, with a level of arrogance that is impossible to fathom how they could have written their email with a straight face.
The support requests we receive for a paid offering from the same company are 99% of time much more pleasant people (of course there are the, "I PAID FOR THIS YOU MUST FIX IT!!!1!" on occasions, but they're a definite minority).
Sounds like a great time to give them a refund because they didn’t get the product they thought they were getting.
Too passive aggressive? :)
When I want to give something away, I list it for some nominal fee like $10, then just tell them to keep it. Because when I used to list things for free, I got the dredges of society bothering me. Asking for delivery, asking me to hold it for 3 months til they can find a truck, cussing at me for saying no to both of these, cussing me because I sold it to someone else already, telling me long sob stories to guilt me. I've never had any of that happen when asking for money(except one guy wanted me to deliver it for $20, which was a fair-ish offer).
I wonder if that same 'pay but you'll get it back under the table' model could work for software? At least until the word got out, I guess.
The only way to do that is to never collaborate with anyone else. I hope he'll be someday able to process what happened, why and reach appropriate conclusions. Software development is a social activity, especially with relatively high-visibility projects like Asahi, and it comes with just as usual burden of social troubles as any other kind of social activity.
Yes.
> The only way to do that is to never collaborate with anyone else.
Not necessarily. You can also treat project politics and social skills like any other technical skills that you need on your team like network engineering or database optimization.
If you can find trusted collaborators with those social and political skills, you can make a lot of things happen without necessarily being very good at it yourself.
Team building has a lot of parallels with building a full stack technology. Or building a sports team.
The real answer is to either learn these skills or, as you suggest, delegate them. Hoping to find something that doesn't involve "all this mess" at all will be fruitless.
Anyway, if your project involves convincing hundreds of maintainers to increase their cognitive/work load in order to include your fancy new foreign workflow breaking language into their project, you have to expect pushback.
In those days, I was part of a core development team for a project with a fairly large community. A few bad users and a few bad development team members is all it takes to poison something like that.
Now I barely even contribute to Open Source projects even when I fix them for my own uses.
This has not been my experience. Perhaps consider that the problem is not the users.
> the active sabotage some angry Linux kernel devs are trying to pull because they don't like Rust
On the other hand, users that demand you rewrite the project in their favorite language or otherwise accomodate their preferences over your own are pretty annoying.
Who's demanding a rewrite of Linux?
I'd expect the worst part for an Asahi project contributor to be the active sabotage some angry Linux kernel devs are trying to pull because they don't like Rust. Users being unreasonable is one thing, but your fellow maintainers are supposed to be allies at least.
I hope Marcan can find a new project to take on that doesn't involve all of this mess.