Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Open source is not about you (2018)

gist.github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 196 posts

Re: Open source is not about you (2018)

#81

Post by hinkley »

_slih wrote: post #17

[dead]

People are always going to neg you in order to try to get more out of you.

During the 00’s I worked for a place that had to pivot because they had a good tool but it wasn’t a daily driver and so the customers didn’t want to pay. They kept imagining some free alternative must exist that didn’t.

They eventually got an exit. Didn’t make anyone rich but they did. But the thing is I showed up to work on that tool, not knowing they’d already pivoted. I did eventually get to work on it a bit, as we found a way to improve one of our other products by fixing bugs in it. I’m kinda glad in retrospect I didn’t work on it first because the code was a mess.

Re: Open source is not about you (2018)

#82

Post by ForceBru »

M95D wrote: post #75

This is the attitude that made me keep my patches to myself. Hey, you, FOSS maintainer, whoever you are: - If you make your project public, it means you want and expect people to use it. You could at least write some documentation, so I don't waste my time and then find out, days later, it isn't capable of what I need or I simply don't know how to use it. - If you set up a bug tracker, then at least have the decency…

Yeah, I didn't like that attitude either.

> As a user of something open source you are not thereby entitled to anything at all. You are not entitled to contribute. You are not entitled to features. You are not entitled to the attention of others. You are not entitled to having value attached to your complaints. You are not entitled to this explanation.

Sure, I'm not entitled to anything. At the same time, this text essentially says "you don't matter", which I personally don't like.

Re: Open source is not about you (2018)

#83

Post by lukaszkorecki »

haberman wrote: post #48
nyeah wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, TFA is a good example of how to write down expectations explicitly. But as far as dinging Hickey for the fact that he eventually needed to write bluntly? I'm not feeling that at all. Some folks feel that open-source teams owe them free work. No amount of explanation will change many of those folks' minds. They understand the arguments. They just don't agree.

> he eventually needed to write bluntly Is there a history of that here? Were there earlier clear statements of expectations (like CONTRIBUTING.md) that expressed the same expectations, but in a straightforward way, that people just willfully disregarded? I don't mean to "ding" anybody, I mostly just felt bad that things had gotten to the point where the author was so frustrated. I completely agree that project owner…

I don't remember the exact situation, but I think this relates to this:

Clojure core was sent a set of patches that were supposed to improve performance of immutable data structures but were provided without much consideration of the bigger picture or over optimized for a specific use case.

There's a Reddit thread which provides a bit more detail so excuse me if I got some of it wrong: https://www.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/a01hu2/the_current...

*Edit* - actually this a better summary: https://old.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/a0pjq9/rich_hickey...

Re: Open source is not about you (2018)

#84

Post by hinkley »

I don’t disagree with Rich Hickey a lot but this one grinds my gears:

> All social impositions associated with it, including the idea of 'community-driven-development' are part of a recently-invented mythology with little basis in how things actually work,

Open source is effectively a gift economy. And we actually talked about it being so in the late 90’s early 00’s. Gift economies are older than human civilization. This is not a recently invented thing, nor is it a mythology. They have rules about how much either party can impose upon the other.

Yes people on the receiving end of those gifts can be entitled brats. That doesn’t negate all social contract on the other side, until it escalates far beyond propriety.

Edit to add:

Rich’s sense of authority to say things like this comes not from his prowess in writing code, which is noteworthy, but from his substantial participation in that gift economy that he is negating here. That entitlement he feels to say something is how gift economies work. Those who gave more have the authority to comment on what happens next.

Re: Open source is not about you (2018)

#85

Post by bachmeier »

M95D wrote: post #75

This is the attitude that made me keep my patches to myself. Hey, you, FOSS maintainer, whoever you are: - If you make your project public, it means you want and expect people to use it. You could at least write some documentation, so I don't waste my time and then find out, days later, it isn't capable of what I need or I simply don't know how to use it. - If you set up a bug tracker, then at least have the decency…

Years ago, I tried the hot new Linux distribution. I tried to install a couple of popular packages, but they failed, due to lacking a dependency. I installed that dependency and it worked.

It's natural to file a bug report for this type of problem. I told them the missing dependency and assumed they'd make a minor adjustment and push out a fix for the buggy package. Instead, they closed the bug with a rude message about how it was a waste of everyone's time to file a bug report without an exact error message, and the buggy package just sat there.

They probably went on to become a SO mod, closing questions because they were duplicates of unrelated questions, but that's speculation.

Re: Open source is not about you (2018)

#86

Post by bachmeier »

> Open source is a no-strings-attached gift, and all participants should recognize it as such.

I've always felt this is incorrect. First, because lots of people use open source to further their careers, it isn't. Open source contributions are paid work if you benefit from them in any way. Second, if you use open source yourself, your work is no longer a gift. You're contributing back to the community you've taken from. The person you're being a jerk to because it's a "gift" might be the author of other software you've used.

Re: Open source is not about you (2018)

#87

Post by bigstrat2003 »

M95D wrote: post #75

This is the attitude that made me keep my patches to myself. Hey, you, FOSS maintainer, whoever you are: - If you make your project public, it means you want and expect people to use it. You could at least write some documentation, so I don't waste my time and then find out, days later, it isn't capable of what I need or I simply don't know how to use it. - If you set up a bug tracker, then at least have the decency…

> If you make your project public, it means you want and expect people to use it.

This isn't true. For many people (myself included), making a project open source means "if you find it useful feel free to make use of it, if not I don't really mind". I don't care, at all, if one soul finds my code useful. It's a gift to the commons, not some kind of social obligation I'm agreeing to.

Re: Open source is not about you (2018)

#88

Post by yunnpp »

warkdarrior wrote: post #24
belval wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an interesting world for sure, I maintain a somewhat popular package and got a form to fill from a Deloitte consultant about security once. They seemed genuinely confused when I told them I was not going to fill compliance form and make patching commitments for free. Really makes you wonder how many maintainers are letting themselves be taken advantage of.

Missed opportunity here. You could have offered consulting services, $10,000/hour. Compliance form requires at 40 hours of work minimum.

No kidding. I don't maintain anything of enough popularity to warrant being approached like that, but a good hourly-rate answer would be the no-brainer response.

Re: Open source is not about you (2018)

#89

Post by tetha »

haberman wrote: post #16

Lately I'm seeing more and more value in writing down expectations explicitly, especially when people's implicit assumptions about those expectations diverge. The linked gist seems to mostly be describing a misalignment between the expectations of the project owners and its users. I don't know the context, but it seems to have been written in frustration. It does articulate a set of expectations, but it is written in…

Someone once said: Abuse and expectations erode a culture of cooperation.

I am currently seeing this in real time at $work. A flagship product has been placed onto the platform we're building, and the entire sales/marketing/project culture is not adjusting at all. People are pushy, abusive, communicate badly and escalate everything to the C-Level. As a result, we in Platform Engineering are now channeling our inner old school sysadmins, put up support processes, tickets, rules, expectations and everything else can go die in a ditch.

Everyone suffers now, but we need to do this to manage our own sanity.

And to me at least, it feels like this is happening with a lot of OSS infrastructure projects. People are getting really pushy and pissy about something they need from these projects. I'd rather talk to my boss to setup a PR for something we need (and I'm decently successful with those), but other people are just very angry that OSS projects don't fullfil their very niche need.

And then you get into this area of anger, frustration, putting down boundaries that are harmful but necessary to the maintainers.

Even just "sending them to the CONTRIBUTING.md". Just with a few people at work, we are sending out dozens of reminders about the documentation and how to work with us effectively per week to just a few people. This is not something I would do on my free time for just a singular day and the pain-curbing salary is also looking slim so far.

Re: Open source is not about you (2018)

#90

Post by zzzeek »

M95D wrote: post #75

This is the attitude that made me keep my patches to myself. Hey, you, FOSS maintainer, whoever you are: - If you make your project public, it means you want and expect people to use it. You could at least write some documentation, so I don't waste my time and then find out, days later, it isn't capable of what I need or I simply don't know how to use it. - If you set up a bug tracker, then at least have the decency…

> - If you make your project public, it means you want and expect people to use it.

no, it doesn't, maybe I have a github project, I want to easily share it with ten of my friends for something, I don't particularly care if other people see it, so I make it public. That in no way implies I want random people to come along with bugs and PRs.

> You could at least write some documentation, so I don't waste my time and then find out, days later, i

if it doesnt have any documentation then that is a clear sign you should not expect anything from the author of that software. if reading some code and figuring out if it's useful to you or not is too much of a risk of your time, then assume it's not useful and move onto something else.

> If you set up a bug tracker, then at least have the decency to answer bug reports.

maybe the author had time and energy to answer bug reports a few years ago and maybe right now they don't. When bugs go unanswered (like, all the bugs, not just one in particular), that means the project is possibly in an unmaintained or semi-unmaintained status, might be time to move on. Or if it's just your bug, it usually means your bug is something the maintainers don't care about or dont have the cycles to spend effort on (again, could be time to move on).

certainly, if I'm an OSS author and I want people to use my project and stay with it, then yes, I'm certainly going to answer all bug reports. But I have no such obligation (indeed I have lots of projects and are in both categories and many in between).

> If you open it up to pull requests, it means you want people to contribute. Have the decency to review them. Someone took time away from their jobs, families or entertainment to write those PRs. Ignoring them because you don't need that feature, not affected by the bug, or simply because of code aesthetics is an insult to the one who wrote it.

counterpoint, people who barge in on your project with huge PRs for features or changes that were not discussed at all much less signed off on by the maintainers are incredibly rude and entitled, because they are using exactly your logic above "I starved my family to bring this to you!" to guilt you into taking your project into directions you may not have wanted, and beyond that, PRs are just as much work for maintainers as for the person contributing them. An unannounced PR to me is pretty much a bug report with a guilt trip attached, no thanks. I really wish Github would provide more options in this area.

- a maintainer

Post reply on HN