When the producers of open source programs, scripts, and utilities spend some of their time, intelligence, and thought on this planet to produce something useful and give that product of their effort away for free, it gets seriously disenheartening to have someone else make a dumb comment, or create an issue out of anger which is unjustified due to the consumer of that product not having read either the documentation, or the source code they decided to use.

Other ways of pissing us off are asking a question which is obviously facepalm-inducingly stupid due to again not having read the documentation/code, or trying to use the product whilst simulataneously not having the first clue on what they're doing (which could be because they're new at coding or handling computer systems in general).

When a producer of Free Stuff gets the kind of bullcrap described above, it wears them down over time.

I have encountered this with my stuff - especially in comments on my blog. I do try to answer questions and be as helpful as possible, but there are some people out there who you just know can't be bothered to do some basic research, or read your helpful instructions, or are basically just too lazy to learn and only want to consume without thinking.

This is what wears people down. It's not just one crappy issue being raised on your stuff in Github, it's the accumulation of this cruft over time - like hundreds of straws piling up on your camel's back - eventually it'll break.

As maintainer of OS project I find this issue justified and constructive. It points to usability problem and how to fix it (documentation). And poster did his homework by debugging script first. He enumerates missing chars (easy to unit tests!) and clearly spells reason (underlying library).

I would love to have such reports all the time!!!

As a creator and maintainer of OS projects, I have to disagree for the following reasons;

1) It is clear from the issue raised, that the creator of the issue did not do his homework. This means actually looking at the README file, and, seeing that the project "exposes the Phantom Open Emoji library unicode/image assets and APIs for working with them", proceed to the link to the Phantom Open Emoji library that the author took the time and trouble to provide a clickable link to , and read on from there.

2) Additionally, the creator of the issue then posted a link to an alternative project.

Ergo, not only was the creator of the issue being lazy in the first place, he then tried to punish the author of the project for that laziness. If you really cannot see this, then I suggest looking again at the project's README, how it describes itself, clicking through to the Phantom Open Emoji library link provided, and reading the information there. Then re-think your opinion on this matter.

Keep in mind that every alternative free library to do something adds cost to the task of selecting a library. Some open source projects (not suggesting any specifically) actually do make life worse for people because they spend time studying it only to find it's not useful.

In my book, spending the time to see whether something is useful (or works) or not, is called "due diligence".

I'm also of the opinion that the time spent raking through libraries that look useful to you to find out if they really are useful to you, more than offsets time you'll spend looking for bugs in your program which were caused by using something which turned out to not do what you thought it did.

It's a silly and petty jab at the maintainer of a small open source project. Fighting with people on these "complaints masked as a fake issue" is one reason people sometimes burn out on maintaining open source projects.

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For a similar scenario: Imagine if some tiny indie band put up a song or two on their own website for free.

Now imagine if the top response said "You songs aren't as good as Taylor Swift's songs. You should disclose that your band isn't Taylor Swift, so I don't waste my time listening to this, and you should take these songs down and replace them with pirated copies of Taylor Swift songs, because I like them better"

That's effectively what's happening on this issue, in open-source-code form.

He didn't pick on the underdog, don't give this false impression. The bug report was certainly not nice, but it was not answered by an unknown anonymous grunt of the open source movement, we're talking 15k followers on twitter.

I think the "Public Contributions" section of the two users says it all:

https://github.com/jakelodwick

https://github.com/steveklabnik

I think it's the entitled aspect of some open source users this is demonstrating.

They expect everything to be the way they want it. they want all opensourced stuff to be polished, supported and free, without wanting to help out or chiping in.

Your comment and (as of this comment, anyway) the thread of replies is one reason why I think using a person's opensource contributions as part of an evaluation of their suitability for employment is a bit ridiculous. There is a whole range of completely arbitrary and subjective "measures" around such contributions, and they end up being no better filters than any of the other (flawed) filters people use to evaluate such things these days.

It may have held (marginally greater) value at some point, but at this point it is just another bullet point clueless HR managers and petty managers can stick next to the "alphabet soup" in their job descriptions.

This is overly cynical. It can be a meaningful positive indicator, and simply not a data point if a candidate lacks one.

That's overly charitable. It can be a meaningful positive indicator, but only the same way that any other work experience can be. Compare that with the proliferation of requirements for experience in specific languages rather than for specific (but more general) engineering ability, and I think my cynical take isn't overly cynical at all.

On the other hand, people use open source to market themselves to promote their talks, books and consultancy gigs. You have to accept the negative sides of that as well. People will start to question the motivations of your contributions. People will be annoyed when the code you promoted has faults in it. Once you are doing things for commercial gain then people's attitudes towards you will shift. That seems inevitable.

>they want all opensourced stuff to be polished

That would be nice though.

Why would you release something to the public and put your name on it if it's lazily done?

This would be ideal, but in my experience evaluating some open source libraries, they were clearly works in progress or abandoned. I think people had good intentions when putting the stuff out there.

Maybe because github is free for public open source, stuff gets put out there before its polished?

> Why would you release something to the public and put your name on it if it's lazily done?

No software is perfect. It has either no features in it or has bugs. The assholes will either demand to get the missing features added or the bugs fixed.

Isn't the whole point of Open Sourcing your stuff, is so that others can contribute to it if they so desire?

Whether or not something is "lazily done" is besides the point. The point is - they produced _something_, and the consumer did not. If you see something which you think could be done in a better way, wouldn't a better use of your time be spent issuing a pull request with your suggested improvement, rather than whining that "it was lazily done" ?

Maybe it's because it involves Steve Klabnik, who is a prominent commenter here?

While the tone of the report may not have been very polite, it is understandable why the reporter was disappointed.

I think it's perfectly reasonable for a user to ask that a library's deficiencies be made obvious in some way, regardless of why they exist. The readme file is a good place for this.

I don't think that Steve handled it very well at all, though. Calling the report creator an "ass" is uncalled for. Creating unnecessary drama over a perfectly reasonable request is uncalled for. Closing the bug without adding a line or two to the readme file addressing this deficiency is uncalled for. Preventing further discussion is uncalled for.

"Politeness" is not a vestigial compile-time option, to be discarded in the pursuit of efficiency.

Having a basic respect for another hacker's time on a project they're maintaining out of the goodness of their heart is what causes people to keep maintaining projects.

> "Politeness" is not a vestigial compile-time option, to be discarded in the pursuit of efficiency.

Especially since rudeness is a good way to get drama and nothing done. To paraphrase Neil Gaiman, maintainers are not your bitch. Treat them as courteously as you would like to be treated yourself.

Perhaps if the issue was raised as a pull request with the desired changes to the Readme, rather than just raising the issue as a general whine.

The whine itself stinks of someone not having gone through the source to see if the product really does what they want it to do. It reeks of "hey this looks like what I want YOINK! " , implementing it in their code, and discovering afterwards that some Things are missing. Then getting pissed off at the producer of the product, rather than at themselves for their oversight/laziness.

I shouldn't have to look through the source code to see if a library does what I want it to do.

That is absolutely what you have to do with open source. If you aren't willing to do that, don't use OSS.

I've been using open source for 20 years and I don't think I've ever had to do that. Sometimes I have to fix bugs in a library or ditch it because it's a piece of crap. However you generally shouldn't have to read the source code to see what it actually does. If so, that's just laziness on the part of the author (and it's wasting everyone's time).

I think this post is attempting to make the exact opposite point? The issue reporter is effectively ranting that the gem isn't good enough, and because it's called "emoji", he for whatever reasons feels entitled to this rant.

I don't see anything wrong with the maintainers response..

someone wanted to launch the hivemind against the bug reporter because he was not deferential enough.

The irony being that the victim is a member of Ember.js who is bullying the rest of open source on twitter while touting how they are saving Africa from a Portland coffee shop.

Not 'not deferential enough', bug reporter is a general asshat. Maintainer seemed well aware of that and replied in kind.

It doesn't matter that the people you are bullying are bullies themselves, that doesn't make your bullying in any way ok.