Don't be that open-source user, don't be me • Hacker News Board

Re: Don't be that open-source user, don't be me

#171

Post by jodrellblank » Mon, Jun 20, 2022, 6:14 PM UTC

b112 wrote: post #140

mitchdoogle wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? Open source is about giving to the community. It's not about what you get from it. It's about providing something useful to people without expecting something in return. It's a core part of computing that makes it so wonderful to be a part of and so aggravating when people abuse it.

Quite. I find this doubly troubling, when someone using Linux for a desktop, learned how to code via free websites, with free software, builds a product using OSS libraries, etc, etc, and then wants to be compensated handsomely for their product. Which is, of course, a tiny tiny little thing, compared to everything it depends upon. OK. Fine. Did you compensate every part of the chain you used? So weird. AWS seems par…

> "OK. Fine. Did you compensate every part of the chain you used? So weird."

GPL: "Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for them if you wish)"

MIT License: "including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software"

Apache License: " each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this section) patent license to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer the Work"

What's weird is giving people permission to do what they want, telling them it's because you value freedom, then when they do something you don't like, complaining.

"Freedom! ... not like that!"

Re: Don't be that open-source user, don't be me

#172

Post by dessant » Tue, Jun 21, 2022, 11:08 AM UTC

samatman wrote: post #169

dessant wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitHub is indeed a platform that can be used for social coding, and it is also a service that encourages the use of contribution guidelines. If the maintainer asks you to open an issue to discuss your contribution before submitting a pull request, you are expected to follow their wishes. https://docs.github.com/en/communities/setting-up-your-proje...

Which of course I do. The emotional side of the burden of closing PRs which don't follow guidelines is the part which can be set aside. It's just a bit of housecleaning, it's seldom done from malice, English is not everyone's first language, etc. Getting upset that a mechanism which exists and won't change gets used is not healthy.

The issue wasn't an occasional mistake done in good faith. The commenter has decided to explicitly dismiss contribution guidelines, and for that the healthy response is to call out their lack of respect for the time of open source maintainers. The focus wasn't on emotional burden either, it can simply take a lot of time to sort out issues and pull requests that do not follow contribution guidelines when you maintain a popular project. It isn't a bit of house cleaning, but hours wasted every week, depending on the project.

Re: Don't be that open-source user, don't be me

#173

Post by einpoklum » Wed, Jun 22, 2022, 11:54 AM UTC

> What I didn’t consider was that my interactions were taking time/attention/resources/patience from the project. User support is a cost.

A lot of it - especially what OP mentioned - is an _investment_ in the project: Bug reports and feature requests are important input for developers, and often even save them more time than they take away.

> Lastly you always have the option to fork the project.

Mostly not. I mean, a fork for creating a merge request, sure, but maintaining a fork is either impossible or overly costly in the large majority of cases AFAICT.