21–30 of 251 posts
I only have one rule: I only contact an open source developer if I believe resolving the problem would make the product better unless I am willing to offer them reasonable money to do it.
Doesn't (almost) every bug report/feature request meet this criterion?
Is this person OK? Doesn't seem it. I use single-spa. I'm now worrying about it's future with the sentiments and apparent dislike of users expressed here.
Once again I wish github would allow the ability to limit who could open issues and PRs in order to do development in the open with a trusted/vetted set of collaborators without being subject to every zero-effort bug report from users.
I'm shocked that it doesn't. What would you do if you were being harassed?
Is this person OK? Doesn't seem it. I use single-spa. I'm now worrying about it's future with the sentiments and apparent dislike of users expressed here.
Open Source will eat your soul if you let it. Low effort drive by issues, questions, or comments are crushing. On my humble project, something like 40% of people who open issues completely ignore the issue template, which means every. single. conversation. begins with asking for the bare minimum of details needed to even help them. Then you've got PRs with literally zero info, which you're expected to spend time reviewing / understanding.
Some people will even violate the Github boundary and email you directly to ask why their issue isn't being responded to, or why their PR isn't getting merged, or whatever. Honestly? Fuck these people.
OP is spot on.
I only have one rule: I only contact an open source developer if I believe resolving the problem would make the product better unless I am willing to offer them reasonable money to do it.
But if people are contacting me about my project, they must be using it, right? Isn't that the point? Can't I just ignore the noise? What's the problem?
I eventually realized my motivations for developing open source software were rooted in vanity. Just making programs is something I do all the time, I find it very rewarding. But the part about open sourcing it, that was the vanity.
Before opening the project, nobody else was contributing anything to it, either. After opening it, all that changed was that my expectations for how people would react to it were not met. Expecting people to want to use my software in exactly the way I wanted was a hell of a lot of arrogance. Those people who were requesting features, they weren't "wrong", they just wanted different software. More like a service that did the things my software could enable, rather than building things with my software.
I don't write the software to get rich or escape a dead-end job. I used to have that fantasy, but nowadays life is pretty happy, and I also have realized the fantasy was always a myth, anyway. So in the end, the difference between writing software and writing open source software is nothing more than me wanting recognition for the thing I created; aka a vain search for glory.
I didn't like that view of myself, so I stopped opening my software.
Once again I wish github would allow the ability to limit who could open issues and PRs in order to do development in the open with a trusted/vetted set of collaborators without being subject to every zero-effort bug report from users.
You can already turn on repository interaction limits limiting issues/PRs to collaborators. It needs to be re-enabled every 6 months https://docs.github.com/en/communities/moderating-comments-a...
- developer finds a cool project - developer consumes the cool project - developer finds opportunity for bug fix or enhancement - developer forks and starts working on the enhancements - developer spends hours/days writing code - developer submits a PR - developer gets a notification (upon filling the PR, or after, from a bot) - developer is now extremely frustrated - developer complains - maintainers and the developer start debating - the Pull Request storm goes viral - developer threatens to stop using cool project - maintainers handle the situation poorly (they are coders, not Public Relations people) - the community makes things worse
And so on...
I only have one rule: I only contact an open source developer if I believe resolving the problem would make the product better unless I am willing to offer them reasonable money to do it.
You may view this feature as making the product better, but it might not fit the vision of the owner/developer and to them it will only generate a maintenance burden and bloat.
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