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Re:"Open Source is awful in many ways, and people should be ... by nanoscopic on Monday October 06, 2014 @10:33AM (#8416046)
Yes, for many years I intentionally did not release more open source due to only having people contact me to ask for help or criticize and never to simply say thank you.

Most recently I have decided that releasing open source is what I want to do, because it is what I want. I don't expect anyone to appreciate it any more.

The parser I wrote has actually made it into several linux distributions ( as well as on the distributed discs ). Several people benchmarked it and said it was amazingly fast. I'm pretty sure it is used by a fair amount of people, but since it is mainly distributed through CPAN I have no idea who really uses it or how many.

I think this is the case for what I wrote because it is a component. People in general I think appreciate tools much more than components, especially if the component is one of many somewhat inter-compatible other options. There is little love for "another thing added to the pile" even if it is different in fundamental ways.

Re:"Open Source is awful in many ways, and people should be ... by pbhjpbhj on Monday October 06, 2014 @12:52PM (#8416861)
>only having people contact me to ask for help or criticize and never to simply say thank you //

I wonder if in part this is due to solicitation - you [by which I mean 'one', a person, not specifically you] have a "support" forum for problems, you have a note asking for contacts with bugs but generally OSS projects don't have a "comment with thanks" or a tip jar or whatever.

Guestbooks used to be the way people could offer a quick comment of thanks.

But as you say this is more likely to work for frontend user-facing projects. Stars on github or similar will show at least that people appreciate your work if they've not explicitly thanked you.