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

jacobtomlinson.dev

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

#151

Post by nijave »

jeroenhd wrote: post #54
davedx wrote: post #40

Counterpoint: you have a successful open source project and you even “branded and marketed” it (like Grafana). You obviously want it to be successful? Then listen to your users and respond to their questions . Entitlement is a two way street.

The company Grafana and the open source project Grafana have different customers with different requirements and requests. If BigCorp wants purple widgets for their next massive migration towards Grafana and a bunch of free users are asking for the Foobars to be yellow then I don't see why it would make any sense for Grafana to take widget purplelization manpower away from their paying customer to yellowify foobars.…

Not sure if Grafana operates this way but some companies make it doubly confusing by running all their feature requests through public issue trackers. It's unclear if there are users replying to issues that already pay but don't pay enough to get exclusive dev team access (which can still be a pretty hefty fee--you could pay $10k/mon but still pale in comparison to the customer with a $1m/year contract)

Azure, AWS, GCP, and Okta all have products I've used with shared issue trackers (for at least some of their software)

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

#152

Post by nijave »

kazinator wrote: post #142

Here is the main problem, highlighted by this comment, from user itmecho: > I'm subscribed to it because I want to know when it gets implemented, not because I want to know every time someone else wants it implemented. > I'm now unsubscribing because I'm finally fed up of the +1 emails so I'll have to manually check this issue periodically instead. All because people can't just put a reaction on the initial message M…

Yeah or the ability to subscribe to status/tag updates. I have a few issues I've been tracking and get spammed with meaningful discussion when I mostly just want to know if it gets implemented.

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

#153

Post by jrochkind1 »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #100
MereInterest wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never really understood the point of these bots. I could understand if an issue had a test case attached to it, and the bot was auto-closing the issue if/when the test passes. That way, if it is resolved when fixing some other bug, or when refactoring, the issue is closed. But closing an issue due to inactivity gives the false impression that the issue has been resolved.

I think they are basically an attempt at form of "issues/tracker bankruptcy" -- we have too many open things here, leaving them all open like we're going to get to them all eventually is a fantasy, and is overwhelming and makes it harder to find the ones we might actually address, so trying to algorithmically close the ones least likely to be actionable is just trying to make the situation more manageable. I think it…

Reading over the Rails committer message there… So Rails, decided that they did not want to discourage code PR contributors (despite getting some poor quality ones, I'm sure).

But other projects may actually want to discourage PR's, or especially Issues, so consider this a plus not a minus. Of course, you can just turn off Issues/PR's, or only allow maintainers to make them, if you really don't want them. But sometimes I'm guessing someone really don't want them but doesn't really want to say so...

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

#154

Post by sigg3 »

saila wrote: post #148
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.

I think what you're describing here is more like free/libre software and not open source, although the lines between those terms have become fuzzy. IMO, open source is pretty much all about expecting something in return.

Free software isn't not commercial software. The GPL _encourages you_ to get paid for software. Free software is not good because of charitable reasons, or any contingent historical artefact. Counterfactually you can imagine a world without patents and software licenses, but the GPL would still be needed as a philosophical concept.

Free software (in FSF / libre sense) is traditional Kantian philosophy, viz. everyone takes part of the whole by attending to their own needs, the Kingdom of Ends. What's not Good -- and in software what the GPL intends to prevent -- is any action that superficially might benefit the actor but undermines the whole (and ipso facto the actor) in the long run.

Making money with proprietary software is a Wrong because proprietary software undermines the activity of writing software at all.

This is my understanding of it anyway YMMV.

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

#155

Post by jacobtomlinson »

Hey HN folks! Author of the post here, wow I didn’t expect this to make the front page. It’s really fun to see all the discussion here around this topic. I’d originally written this post to just have something up my sleeve to send to folks who were being unkind to open source maintainers. I’m enjoying seeing some of the counter arguments too.

The general intent of this post is to try and communicate to folks that if you consume open source software the authors of that software don’t owe you anything. However they all contribute for a reason, whether that is personal enjoyment, presence in the market, user testing, etc. They are excited to have folks use their software and they definitely want to hear from you. But it’s important to remember that this isn’t a commercial arrangement like when you buy Photoshop. So if you want to interact with a maintainer remember to be kind and respectful (you probably should be with all humans anyway). It is up to them where they focus their effort, and if they have a choice between interacting with nice folks or rude folks who do you think they will choose?

I also regularly see folks being rude on the most important issues, which results in maintainers avoiding them and even more folks being rude. It can snowball into having things that are critical to the community becoming a low priority to the maintainers.

TLDR; Be kind to folks who give you things for free.

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

#156

Post by jacobtomlinson »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #39
laurent123456 wrote: post #8

Regarding adding +1 to issues - rather than doing this, up-vote the issue on GitHub (thumb up). This can be useful to maintainers because they can sort by thumb up and see the most popular ones. Adding a +1 comment really does nothing - it's just one more useless notifications for everyone, and it won't allow filtering or sorting issues. People might even unwatch the issue because of this and thus missing useful comm…

Perhaps I misunderstood the author, I assumed '+1' in this context meant the thumbs-up reaction. I'm certainly feeling much more charitable towards the OP if they literally meant people commenting "+1" (which is unfortunately a thing), but I think in a lot of contexts "+1", "thumbs-up", "like" are interchangable.

OP here. Thumbs up is great, commenting with the string “+1” is not great, commenting with “Why this this not done yet, this is very important to me. I might switch to another project if you don’t implement this.” is terrible.

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

#157

Post by jacobtomlinson »

dom96 wrote: post #68

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…

OP here, glad you enjoyed this post. Sorry that you’ve also experienced the bad side of things.

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

#158

Post by karmakaze »

orbital-decay wrote: post #147

The biggest thing that I failed to understand was that with every user commenting this feature is essential for me to keep using Grafana or asking why hasn’t this been implemented yet? a barrier was being built to stop anyone from ever working on it. Wait, does the article not explain why, or does my comprehension fails me? Other points have been reiterated a million times, and still worth to be reiterated. Sure, the…

> a barrier was being built to stop anyone from ever working on it.

I looked in the grafana github issues, sort by +1's and the top one "Templating: Reuse template variable definitions across dashboards"[0] opened in 2015 has these comments (and others):

"yea, with Grafana 2.0 and the new backend, it would be possible in a future release (maybe next year or this winter), to add template variables as independent entities that you can reuse across dashboards."

"Torkel, this is exteremely important for us, any chance you could prioritize this?" +1 (23x), -1 (1x)

"no, maybe if it would get a lot of +1 :) People have been fine without centralized storage of template vars this far, just define them for one dashboard and then copy that dashboard. Not ideal. [...]"

This is exactly how I expect these interactions to go. I suspect the difference is that this is an issue that is on the radar and close to where the contributors are working vs many of the other 2.2k issues that are not.

July 2021 comment "[...] we do plan on tackling this issue as part of our evolution of Library Panels. We don't have a timeframe to communicate yet, but consider it 'on the roadmap'." So even ones that are on the radar don't necessarily get immediate attention.

What may be missing is clear up-front communication to set expectations for those creating, commenting, or up/down-voting on issues. We as a community can also default to interpreting a non-response as being 'lower priority or relevance than contributor bandwidth allows'.

[0] https://github.com/grafana/grafana/issues/1959

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

#159

Post by jacobtomlinson »

FatalLogic wrote: post #2

This is a thoughtful and important article for anyone who uses or creates open-source software, which is everyone. But, if we follow this advice? If some more thoughtful and considerate users kindly reduce their input into support conversations to avoid overwhelming developers, doesn't this mean that support conversations will become dominated by users who are not thoughtful and considerate?

OP here, thanks for the kind words!

I hear your point. I’m not saying don’t make a comment, just that folks should try and consider the human on the other side more.

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

#160

Post by jacobtomlinson »

jmull wrote: post #111

My general advice on this is to never rely on other people reading your mind. It's a path to frustration for you and the other people. In this article I see a lot of phrases where OP is hoping other people share the same perspective. Like, "Hopefully we agree that...", "I want to argue here...", "Users... shouldn’t expect..." It's just not going to happen like that automatically, though. I suggest that if, as an open…

Author of the article here. Thanks for this comments, really great points and sadly I agree with everything you’ve said.

Although I would say many projects snowball into something bigger than the creator imagined so upfront planning about how much time you can put into something is hard.

I wrote this post with the intention of directly sharing it with folks in issues when situations flare up from time to time in the projects I work on. I never imaged it getting shared on HN.

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