Comment by submeta
3 years ago
Kovid Goyal, the developer of Calibre, is a very responsive, very gentle person. Whenever I needed help, I have gotten help from him. [1] - Calibre is an indispensable tool for me to manage my digital library with close to 800 books.
I support him regularly. Consinder doing it as well if you appreciate the app. Go to https://calibre-ebook.com/ , there’s a support link on the top right.
[1] This is the forum dedicated to Calibre https://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=166
OT, but he also happens to be the developer of kitty, my favorite terminal emulator on Linux: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty
Yeah kitty is amazing. I've been meaning to donate as a thank you. It's made so many things possible. In fact, because of it's flexibility, today I wrote a vscode extension that can use some of kitty's remote control features so I can execute things in my terminal of choice straight from my editor of choice.
uh, that's interesting! what's the name of the extension?
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Their github issue handling did not give me the same impression that parent has of him.
I think he’s really dedicated to making a specific thing and gets frustrated when users ask for “Swiss Army knife” features. I have empathy for that situation.
That said, being unkind to otherwise civil users is never OK.
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I had no idea! Awesome.
I interviewed him once. Such a kind and responsive developer. He told me he put 80 hours per week, on average, in Calibre’s development.
Edit: the interview (in Spanish) https://calibre.softonic.com/articulos/entrevista-a-kovid-go...
Oh come on, that was one incident and he did fix the main issue. For a dude who does this in his spare time, he deserves a lot of credit.
I'm not talking about the security incident. Anyone can have bad days, I am not the one to hold the grudge.
What I've experienced is that Kovid is consistently hostile to anyone who disagrees with him in the slightest. There is no attempt to shine light on the argument or defuse the situation whatsoever - it always ends with comments like "what do you want from me? you get this project for free! if you don't like it nobody is forcing you to use it! get off my lawn!!!".
Of course, the guy has the right to talk to anyone any way he wants.
But I also have the right to publicly call him out on that.
I think he works full-time on his open source projects, but regardless I wouldn't fault him for that silly incident at all.
Try giving out years of your labor for free, and then try not being sensitive about it...
I know quite a few open-source maintainers who have never showed any kind of hostility, even in situations which would warrant hostility.
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How on earth is overly sensitive a problem for anyone? Assuming for the sake of argument he is.
It is very difficult to communicate with Kovid when you're not a user and you've not previously praised his genius. Any kind of criticism or suggestion that isn't wrapped up in the "but your project is awesome and you're awesome!!!" wrapping-paper is met with hostility, insults and banning.
It is a problem for anyone trying to communicate with him.
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