71–80 of 173 posts
I irrationally get annoyed when someone asks for an ETA like this, I'm sure it's a genuine question but it just feels like a nag to "hurry the fork up already!"
The takeaway I am getting is: don’t interact or communicate with open source projects you use.
Grafana is a bad example. They switched to agpl and pushing companies in paying for it. Which is okay of course but grafana labs is no longer a free open source project. Of course potentially feature request might come in by key account manager or other hidden business agreements but I myself still comment on the opensource front like GitHub issues. When my company now pays money for it, my expectation definitely cha…
Familiarize yourself with the difference between "free beer" and "free speech".
The F in FOSS refers to the latter, you're fixating on the former.
The FSF has never objected to charging money for Free/GPL software. Programmers need to eat too.
Thank you to the author for writing this. Entitlement in open source is a massive problem, I have experienced it first-hand many times. The problem is that it discourages contributions not only from the existing maintainers but also from people who may volunteer to fix issues in the future. Would you be willing to contribute if most of the issues are just asking for things (often rudely) and not even saying thanks wh…
As an open source maintainer[1], the etiquette tips are great. However, I think +1 and status check comments are ok in certain situations where the issue might have been forgotten or it's a high priority issue. I also like when someone reminds me they're blocked by an issue. It helps me prioritize fixing bugs so I work on things actually affecting people instead of things nobody is using. Just be polite and your comm…
> As time went on the wording of the +1s got stronger, people demanded that it be implemented and expected it to be scheduled into future milestones.
I don't think they thought the +1 was an issue with respect to prioritization. Rather, it is an issue because it is a form of confirmation for users to behave in entitled ways.
As an open source maintainer[1], the etiquette tips are great. However, I think +1 and status check comments are ok in certain situations where the issue might have been forgotten or it's a high priority issue. I also like when someone reminds me they're blocked by an issue. It helps me prioritize fixing bugs so I work on things actually affecting people instead of things nobody is using. Just be polite and your comm…
Comments that add nothing to the issue but just create noise in the notification feed are annoying.
That is not true. If the use of the tool provides "no value" to the company, then why on earth are they making the tool available. Yes, there is no money exchanging hands, but there is definitely some value.
Here's some value a company gets when someone uses a tool/piece of software without paying money (source: my company has a full feature free tool that competes with our paid offering, and often wins).
* awareness of the solution in the marketplace
* developer attention (way way easier to get a developer to try a free tool vs one that costs $0.01)
* bug finding (often in environments that would be hard to stand up for the company)
* user testing (related to bug finding, but often users will give feedback about feature direction)
* market share (if they are picking your free tool, they aren't paying for a competitor)
At my current job, we often leverage this (our GitHub issues repo and forum are main sources of our roadmap).
That's not to say that you should expect the same kind of service when you are a free user as when you are paying money. But attention is valuable too, esp of developers.
And it's not like if you pay money, a product company jumps to build whatever you ask for. Unless you pay a large amount compared to their current revenue and even then, if what you want conflicts with their long term vision, wise leaders won't.
* Feedback is needed. After years I built up a filter to annoying users, and I would simply ignore their feedback, but +1 and mentioning the feature would be useful is invaluable (and why you cannot use workarounds). Please do that in a nice, productive way (:
* It might be that the feature you and others are asking for was in paid version of the project, thus maintainers actively ignored it. Not the healthiest thing to do, but this happens, business matters, especially if governance is poor (single vendor behind the project).
* I think it would be useful to mention that if it's just a work needed and not other blocker, anyone would be welcome to create PR for the needed feature or at least moving it forward 10%. Sometimes faster that motivating your rights in issues (: