Comment by ajsharp
10 years ago
I get that these are super frustrating issues for these people (cough guys) that maintain these repos, but there's something telling about it that it's all JS people. That last cute lil paragraph really sums it up for me:
> Hopefully none of these are a surprise to you as we’ve told you them before. We’ve waited years now for progress on any of them. If GitHub were open source itself, we would be implementing these things ourselves as a community—we’re very good at that!
LOL. I can't tell if this is "go-fuck-yourself"-level passive aggression, or mindless hopefulness that there might actually be a universe in which Github (or a company like it, with hundreds of millions of dollars of venture funding) could be open source. If I worked at Github, my first thought after reading this would be "mmmmm yeeeeaaaaaaa y'can g'fuck yr'self", while the second thought would be "yea, you're not wrong". Generally, passive aggression gets you nowhere when you're asking for something from someone/something who owes you nothing (I know, I know, they "owe" their customers everything).
The Node/React/JS community is hilariously entitled, petulant and childish. The tone of this whole letter is so god damned millennial, it's mind-boggling, because they're not wrong about anything they're asking for. But it's how they ask for it that leaves a dry, acid-y taste in your mouth.
I agree that the "we’re very good at that!" was not needed. But the rest of the letter is ok to me, not particularly entitled. It is after all an open letter, open letters are designed to pressure people into something. In this case, these people have been asking for changes for years nicely and privately and have been ignored. They are just pressuring them as any customers would do. One may ignore the history of git, but its very existence came to be because a million dollar company called BitKeeper started ignoring its open source customers because they didn't owe them anything. Look what happened to them. Who even remembers BitKeeper? Maybe github should take these millennials hippy contributors more seriously if it doesn't want to end the same way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_(software)#History
Interestingly most of these people are older than the millennial category
Fooled me ;)