> If you end up telling your users "Please - use something 
  > else and don't come back." you're the problem.

Of course the idea that there is no mailing list for Massive where this sort of internet banter can occur...well that's exactly why there is no mailing list.

What would you say they're moving towards? I have to shamefully admit that I never learned LINQ, preferring to write and use raw SQL(which can be unwieldy if you're dealing with the type of database that could really use an ORM), but I didn't know there was something else that trumps LINQ?

That seems totally insane.

haha seriously? He's the "problem"? What problem? He is the author and owner of the repo in question, and he can do pretty much whatever the hell he wants within that repo. The other guy is entitled to exactly on extra large serving of "nothing whatsoever".

If you have some freeloading, non contributing imbecile that randomly stops by to tell you how you did it all wrong, and when are you going to make it so that it is more to this guys liking, the only problem I see is the random twat.

Rob said 'done', the commenter interpreted this as 'end of life', which is both clueless (in that way that corporate-worldview meets actual programmer can be) and borderline insulting.

Well, quite, as the entire conversation makes very clear. Rob doesn't say it was end of life, he said it was finished. He says "End of life." at the beginning of the para here to headline this part of his reply.

"If you end up telling your users "Please - use something else and don't come back." you're the problem."

He's not telling his users to get lost. His users are very happy and have used this project for ages and at massive scale because it's stable and it works. He's telling one particular user to get lost, a user that doesn't even understand how github works.

I stand by my opinion though. If you tell this to any single user, you're just being a mean person for no reason and you are the reason they are unlikely to understand what the issue is about. Maybe that user just read the message and wrote to people he knows "I'm never using opensource projects from github, and this maintainer is the reason." - how does that situation improve in the community?

Rob could end it in so many different ways that would be less aggressive. He didn't even say "learn how github/FOSS works and then check the project again", just "don't come back". It sounds like it's us-vs-them and "they" cannot be expected to learn and improve.

Rob doesn't owe this user anything. Nothing. Not even a reply.

He's being nice by responding at all. The passive-aggressive undertone to the user's questions - trying to evaluate the project to use it, and freeload on Rob's work, rather than take it as a starting point for further customization and personal stewardship, while criticizing things like performance before he's measured anything - this is pretty hard to swallow.

Rob may have responded to the cluelessness a little harshly, but it's hard to hold everything back when you're in a conversation with someone like this. And I don't blame him, because like I said, the guy wasn't owed anything.

Users like this aren't the "customers" for a piece of code like this. This is a seed file that you hack and customize for your purposes; it's not a library that you simply link in, or pull from upstream on a regular basis. The right thing to say to a user like this is: go away; this is not for you.

The what?

   Massive is not the right tool for the bugfiler's workflow.

   The bugfiler's purpose is to engage in an Internet debate.

Was there a particular reason you linked this?