Interestingly, I tried asking this on Reddit once, and the majority of replies indicated they didn't want a thank-you letter:
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/71fupc/foss_develope...
Why we never thank open source maintainers
81–90 of 229 posts
Re: Why we never thank open source maintainers
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Send them quotes back: "I'm glad you liked it, I have X hours to dedicate to project Y this month. If you'd like, I'm willing to work on that feature for you under terms Z". People _pay_. You'd be surprised just how much of Chromium and other open ssource projects is written by consulting companies paid by third parties to solve a use case.
Some different perspective. Example Debian with plenty of poorly maintained packets which broke original behavior (say linked against another library which is not recommended by upstream) or disable some features or outdated (not in sense of stable/unstable). Sending DD messages 'please fix, thanks' looks like is very reasonable (although some of them do not think so). Either your maintainer or not - even say one can…
Reporting the bug is reasonable. Bugging (no pun intended) them is not.
even say one can do it 'better'
Then offer to take up the maintainer role. Debian has institutions to deal with unresponsive maintainers.
Re: Why we never thank open source maintainers
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Asking users to pay you isn't talking down to them. It's what sensible businesses do. If I walk into McDonald's and say "Hey give me a cheeseburger" it's not rude for them to ask for the $0.99 in exchange.
I'm not against offering to work on the problem in exchange for money. I'm against outright responding to a feature request with an estimate. If you don't want to work on the feature (i.e. you're uninterested ), it's better to be honest about it. If you do want to work on it, but your time would be better spent on anything else, and you're willing to work on it for money, first ask if the requester is interested in p…
[deleted]
Re: Why we never thank open source maintainers
#84BTW this is actually to promote this: http://www.thankyouopensource.com/ Putting the link here might make it more obvious.
It's a pity that this website is exclusively for repositories on Github and thus contributes to the harmful idea that free software only exists when it is on Github.
We will add other platforms later.
Re: Why we never thank open source maintainers
#85As the maintainer of a reasonably popular library, I actually get irritated by a lot of 'thanks', because they are in the form of this sentence: 'Hi, can you implement ? Thanks!' Usually from people who have never contributed anything. Honestly, being thanked in any shape or form does nothing for me, Id rather have users be more considerate of our time and not abuse issues and the community for supporting their lazin…
Send them quotes back: "I'm glad you liked it, I have X hours to dedicate to project Y this month. If you'd like, I'm willing to work on that feature for you under terms Z". People _pay_. You'd be surprised just how much of Chromium and other open ssource projects is written by consulting companies paid by third parties to solve a use case.
Interesting. What are some examples of things consulting companies have added?
Re: Why we never thank open source maintainers
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Honestly, this exudes arrogance, even if the intention is completely free of ill will. I would rather say that asking to "implement " for free exudes several more magnitudes of arrogance.
I get what you're saying, but even without the requested feature, the existing code also took time, mental effort and opportunity costs to come into existence — the user sees it and naturally imagines, "there's more where this came from". Not all users are at the same level of experience as you (a maintainer); this doesn't make them lesser people or even lesser developers (sometimes they're just good in a different p…
Stating your price for a given feature is not "offloading your annoyance" and I didn't see anybody implying that people asking for feaures are "lesser people" or "lesser developers".
You seem to be setting up a few strawmen here.
Re: Why we never thank open source maintainers
#87[deleted]
Re: Why we never thank open source maintainers
#88[deleted]
Re: Why we never thank open source maintainers
#89As the maintainer of a reasonably popular library, I actually get irritated by a lot of 'thanks', because they are in the form of this sentence: 'Hi, can you implement ? Thanks!' Usually from people who have never contributed anything. Honestly, being thanked in any shape or form does nothing for me, Id rather have users be more considerate of our time and not abuse issues and the community for supporting their lazin…
This isn't a thank you though, this is a polite way to ask you to do some work. A thank you is a thank you, and nothing else, it doesn't come with demands.
Re: Why we never thank open source maintainers
#90I thank authors and maintainers and I expect others do too. I just don't do it publicly. I've thanked authors of small projects which are unique and useful to me just by dropping a short email (not en masse) - Not out of some obligation, but because it's an encouraging thing to receive. I want them to know someone is finding utility in what they have done and appreciates it enough to tell them. I don't think the larg…
I maintain a fairly popular repository, and it does brighten my day when I receive an email like this! Unfortunately, you are getting more random malformated issues (ie. “DOESN’T WORK. WHEN FIX”) than thanks!
Please don't feel disheartened by those types of issues. They seem to pop up on all kinds of projects after some threshold of popularity.
I haven't originated any popular repos myself, but of the few I have contributed to, these types of issues can be quite common. One of the projects is a math library and a swear 1/2 issues are people discovering for the first time how floating point math behaves and complaining profusely that it's the authors fault.
If you can gain some contributors to help you do the weeding in your issues list it can help with your sanity greatly.
This is one feature that I wish hosting platforms like github/gitlab etc had to help authors and maintainers: ability to grant issue management permissions (separately from full repo access).