Comment by darpa_escapee
7 years ago
I've had a similar experience when submitting a patch for an open source Google product.
Jumped through their hoops, was met with denial and skepticism of a problem hundreds of people were reporting, that is until one of the skeptical project members independently cited a standard that I had cited in my pull request. We go back and forth for two weeks to refine the pull request, where I am doing all of the revisions. Eventually they're given approval and I assume all is well.
About three months went by, their product is still broken so I check on the pull request and it appears that the relevant people tested and approved of my patch... but they wanted a test suite written for it. They expected me to write and submit tests for their broken product after spending a month of my free on their project.
I was left with feeling as though Google employees should just do their jobs if they want their products to work, as I'm not wasting any more of my time by doing work for them for free.
This is a sharp contrast with other projects I've contributed to, where the response has been "Thanks for pointing out a problem with our project, let's do everything we can to fix it" instead of an uphill battle that was my experience with Google.
If they want the tests to be written beforehand by the patch developer, they need to write that in the guidelines. If that isn't present in the guidelines, or they're not accepting patches to testing/building process, they should write these tests themselves.
Otherwise it's just the same thing as child labor. Unethical, ugly, and sad.