Comment by ranting-moth
2 years ago
The feeling of entitlement people have around open source is unsustainable.
If someone releases code then that's it. You have it. Do what you want with it (within it's licence). Be thankful.
Unless that guy specifically says he's going to maintain it for free you are entitled to exactly absolutely nothing more you ungrateful little git.
If you add this code to your project, you should fix and share any problems you encounter as a token of gratitude.
I agree with your sentiment of "Unless that guy specifically says he's going to maintain it for free you are entitled to exactly absolutely nothing"
That works both ways though, a maintainer cannot expect users to not complain (so they have to develop management strategies where they ignore the noise, rather than try to engage/capitulate). A maintainer can also not lament when users do not feel the desire to contribute monetarily.
>so they have to develop management strategies where they ignore the noise
I believe this is called “please use the template when submitting an issue” and we all know how that goes.
I’ve honestly found myself laughing like a madman at GitHub issues where the maintainer calmly and repeatedly tries to explain to the increasingly disgruntled reporter to UTFT (use the fine template)
I keep thinking that GitHub (and GitLab, and etc) made the initial costs to interacting with the developers unhealthily low. The barrier of having to create an account or adding your email to a newsletter on the older distributed systems was extremely good on filtering out that kind of thing.
Also, "Issues" should really, really have a different name.
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I got so sick of people uploading screenshots of the in-app log console that I spent significant effort to make that control not render during a screenshot.
Taking and cropping a screenshot takes more time than just uploading the plaintext log file conveniently and lovingly placed right next to the executable. Please, just upload the file. Please.
The project was a Big Deal in the circles I was in. Hundreds of thousands of people knew of it, we had hundreds to thousands of active users each with dozens of clients. It was so stressful and I caught so much abuse that I exited software altogether. We did get some money, but my cut worked out to $60 a month.
I still write and publish code, but I don't work on anything that anyone wants to use. I don't get involved in communities and I don't interact with users.
And you know what? I am much happier now.
To be fair the UX on those things is abysmal.
Github could improve the experience 10 fold.
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> a maintainer cannot expect users to not complain
Eh… Isn’t that fairly close to the definition of entitlement (i.e. you complain when you have no reason to)?
As a maintainer you cannot control how people behave. There’s no point in lamenting that people act entitled.
Instead, it is more productive to develop strategies to ignore the noise from entitled voices. You do not need to respond to them. You do not need to convince them. You do not have to keep them happy.
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> That works both ways though, a maintainer cannot expect users to not complain (so they have to develop management strategies where they ignore the noise, rather than try to engage/capitulate). A maintainer can also not lament when users do not feel the desire to contribute monetarily.
The solution is quite simple really.
1) have your repo private and release only tarball files or have a read only repo with no pull/merge request functionnality 2) do not use an issue tracker
Basically, do not use a forge such as github/gitlab, at least not publicly. Problem solved.
GitHub also lets you turn off the issue tracker, which is wonderful for projects which are ""incidentally open source"" where I have no plans to maintain it beyond my own personal needs
This is right, but maintainers themselves often forget. They don't enforce this. Their little thing became very important and they became a rock star, so they carry the world on their shoulders. They respond to feature requests that are out of scope originally. They let any and every PR in. Maintainers often manage to do things with their project that turn them into bahemoths and support large industry and find themselves stuck.
More maintainers need to take the "no guarantee of fitness for purpose" part of their license more seriously. Don't fall for the temptation to be everything for everyone. Don't cave to social pressure.
> More maintainers need to take the "no guarantee of fitness for purpose" part of their license more seriously.
I get this, as a very bottom line. But a lot of great projects are great because the developers consciously want people to use and depend on their work.
Their is a living changing informal social bargain, unique to each project, along with licensing, economic and other concerns.
Well, I'd say if you want users to depend on your work, you're voluntarily signing yourself up to endless maintenance for little reward. I look at it like this: I built something cool, if it's useful to you, use it. But if you come to depend on it, and doubly so for business use, maybe you should consider being prepared to maintain it yourself. Other people look at it differently, and if it's your goal for the world to depend on your work and you haven't set yourself up to benefit from that responsibility you take on yourself in a way that you like, then I don't really think it's a problem the rest of us have to solve.
Is it unsustainable like the title of the article says? I suppose, but it's not some state of affairs that is unavoidable or that we are stuck with through no fault of our own. A guy wants people to depend on his work that he does for free, a company sees a core component of their business that they can get for free, a few years later the guy is upset that he is maintaining this thing everyone depends on and the company is scared their business will fall apart without him. They each got themselves there, it's a predictable state of affairs, the solutions for each party are very clear. As a developer though, the solution is what I've outlined: take the "no warranty of mechantibility or fitness for purpose" part of your license seriously and tell entitled people to solve their own problems.
What is the evidence for this feeling of entitlement?
I use tons of free software. I've never either demanded that anyone work on it for free, nor have I expressed any sense of entitlement or expectation.
You’re in the majority. But look through any issue list of popular(ish) oss projects and there’s a small but very vocal minority just sucking up the maintainers’ energies like vampires.
I hear this and it makes sense that a minority of users sucks up a lot of time, but what isn't clear to me is why maintainers don't ignore these people.
I've never maintained a popular open source project so maybe there's something about the situation I just don't understand. But it seems like:
> Thank you for your feature request, we will add it to the backlog. The core team doesn't work on unfunded feature requests because they use up a lot of time and resources. We are happy to review high quality PRs from anyone interested in implementing the feature. We also have a variety of sponsorship options, and a list of past contributors and maintainers available for contract work.
would be reasonable and polite?
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I feel like public project roadmaps would really help here. If only for the maintainers to be able to flat out reject stuff because it's not on the map.
Just look around forums and socials like Reddit. I see people bitching how OBS Studio doesn't work for them the exact way they want it while contributing nothing to the project almost daily.
This happens less where the FOSS choice is a drop in a sea of established proprietary packages (FreeCAD, KiCad, Godot) but way way more when they have already established themselves as the popular pick (OBS Studio, Blender) so they get flooded by less tech-savy, more casual users that don't really see the value of open source other than they don't pay for it.
"Normal" people have always had stuff given to them for "free" (either "you are the product" or built-in licenses like Windows) so they don't realize the goodwill and sacrifices that FOSS goes through.
> so they get flooded by less tech-savy, more casual users that don't really see the value of open source other than they don't pay for it
this was solved 30 years ago by an important socio-technical invention called the FAQ, used together with a social convention of not elevating or rewarding vexatious messages.
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One example I noticed recently is when YouTube stopped allowing ad-blockers. You should have seen the people posting on the uBlock subreddit demanding it being fixed, it was kind of crazy.
why would any sane maintainer even look at the subreddit for their software for even 1 second?
You may not be part of the problem.
However, there are entire industries that leverage open-source / free software, and put unreasonable, uncompensated demands on it.
At the end of the day though, I don't see the problem. As a maintainer of open-source, gratis, software, just don't do the work. It isn't like it is a job. If you don't do the work, they can't fire you.
Is that good for the community? Surely not, but who is asking whether the status quo is working for the developers? Nobody but them. So look out for yourself, and scratch your own itch, but don't treat open source as a job.
He didnt mean you specifically. But there are lots of people demanding fixes like its their birthright.
My favorite one is “you should do what I am asking because it would make your project more popular”.
Weee. Exposure.
I maintain some popular packages. It's not often, but it's far from never. Some people are really nasty, I've yet to figure out why.
Something like 5% of the population are insane. No need to figure out any behavior once you factor that in.
If you've maintained an OSS project and managed the tickets raised, you'd know.
> The feeling of entitlement people have around open source is unsustainable.
Free-rider problem [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem
Haha I was just thinking about something similar recently.
Imagine visiting a coffee shop and telling the barista: "hey, by the way, I can make my own coffee at home for free, you know?"
People seem somehow OK with thinking this way when it comes to software.
Those two things are connected.
People will spend $10 on a coffee drink at Starbucks without blinking. Suggest that they spend $10 on a piece of software and they’ll throw a fit and claim you are taking away their rights.
Some people. There are people who think Starbucks is too expensive. There are people who donate to open source.
I don't know anyone who doesn't think Starbucks is overpriced slop. In any European city you'll find local cafes with better quality and prices than what Starbucks sell.
They seem to only be present in the big metro areas that attract a lot of tourists, travelers and immigrants who are familiar with the Starbucks brand and go for that out of habbit and know quality, similar to how McDonald's is so popular.
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People will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on proprietary software.
Most of those people won’t spend $100 on open source software.
In businesses I've observed this behavior tends to surround dysfunctions in liability and understanding of liability organizationally and from business management.
If you make a purchasing decision, your ass is on the line when people ask why certain product/service isn't fulfilling some arbitrary business need. In theory, assuming the functionality is part of the advertised purchase, the liability of the thing you're paying for lies on that third party. You did your due diligence. If you chose some open source combination with in-house build, they're going to question why you didn't outsource some envisioned cheaper third party option (sometimes, this is a legitimate strategy, often from my experience it's not). So you default to big vendor big solution to protect yourself.
Apologies are made and blah blah, discussions about "what alternatives do/did we have" and you often end up landing on implementing some mixture of leveraging public domain software and in-house customization atop/leveraging it to solve the problem you were paying for. In the end, you end up doing what you probably knew was the correct path anyways: this vendor solution is questionable, it doesnt completely align with our business needs, and it's not going to get the actual need done. Conveying that to business leaders is often impossible though. So, to pass liability/responsibility and cover your ass with incompetent business leadership, you throw often thousands, tens, or hundreds of thousands away.
I've had this discussion so many times and sat in these meetings so many times it grows tiring. The fact is, sometimes a generic solution works for your business (Office for example is a pretty generic need and often aligns), often it really doesn't (some arbitrary more niche/custom thing you do? Maybe, good luck).
I had this moment of cognitive dissonance when I noticed that one colleagues would use "open source" as a synonym for "poor quality". Context: I was working as a contractor, for a bank. That colleague was managing a bunch of *nix instances used to deploy our web services.
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if they had to pay for open source then they couldn’t afford to pay for commercial software?
Yep, and if you ask them to they will throw a fit and claim you are taking away their rights.
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Hm, why do you think that is? Do programmers just respect each other less than they respect baristas?
If Starbucks started giving the drinks away for free, I doubt people would still pay $10 for it.
Because they got trained to think that way by the "free as in speech and free as in beer" and "Why pay for Windoze? (sic) Linux is free" marketing the early FOSS advocates used.
Overwhelming majority of people don't buy 10$ coffee. They just don't do it.
Telling people to have gratitude isn't going to fix a logistical problem or social phenomenon.
It's like telling people not to be Christian/Buddhist/muslim because religion is just a bunch of fantasy stories.
it gets complicated when the project is intentionally marketed, and users deliberately attracted. i think at that point it ceases being purely source available and burdens the creator/marketer with support duties. unfortunately at the moment, most open source projects are actively marketed, including fringe and poorly thought out products.
> you should fix and share any problems you encounter as a token of gratitude.
The whole point of the GPL is to change "should" into "must" for these fixes. That makes it a two-way street.
The entitlement and ranting is a direct consequence of the recent GPL-hating campaign.
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It still beats having a central planner from the politburo tell you to work in the mines for zero compensation.
You know that's not how central planning worked, right? You were told to live in a specific place, with a few (narrow) options on where to work at (unless you were (un)specialised, then there was sometimes zero choice), for meagre but sufficient compensation. You could have a place to live, food to eat. The place to live might be a room in an apartment shared with other families, the food to eat might be bread with bread, and there were little things you could buy outside of necessities, but you were compensated and it was near certain you would have a roof over your head, and baring drastic mismanagement/crisis, enough food.
If that's better than some having more money that they could possibly use, many having access to amazing amenities and luxuries, but a lot struggling to eat enough quality food and not being able to have a roof over their head is IMO a philosophical question. Do you prefer everyone (of course with some minor exceptions for higher ups) to be equally "not great, but not terrible" or do you prefer some to have amazing lives, but others to suffer?
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I don't actually think that's a problem with capitalism (though it has many problems).
I've always seen this as the markets reflecting what we collectively actually prioritize. Sure we want to be safe and educated, but damn it if we don't really get enjoyment out of fancy new toys, vacations, and new cloths.
In this case capitalism doesn't seem to be holding down salaries of the careers you listed. Its noteworthy that most of those industries are unionized, but if the unions are worth anything at all they should be pushing salaries higher than the market would have otherwise paid.
Teaching, nursing, and policing are all either _highly_ regulated or outright organized by the government. So I don't know if it makes sense to say something like "the market chooses not to prioritize policing" or "teacher's unions allow teachers to collect above-market salaries". The voters seem more relevant than the market here.
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So the end result is that you live in a society where the average quality of education and health care slowly plummets to zero?
That is not a sustainable solution for society.
I'm not quite following - are you criticising modern late stage Captitalism or some imaginary implementation of bureaucracy?
No? What the fuck is this crap logic every time someone suggests we may not be living under a great politico-economic system? How did we go from "maybe we should tame inequality" to "let's resurrect Stalin"? Fucking fuck.
A maintainer position for a software project is like any position or role, in say, a charity. You aren’t technically forced to do the work, but the charity announces publicly (on its web site, for instance) that the work will be done, and people expect it to be done. If you do not feel up to doing it anymore, you owe it to other people (who expect the work to be done) to announce your retirement and hand the position over to new people.
Any project which is not a going concern should:
A: Not, IMHO, be called a ”project”
B: Be clearly labelled, in its public-facing information, as being offered as-is, without any implied updates or future development.
> B: Be clearly labelled, in its public-facing information, as being offered as-is, without any implied updates or future development.
So if I had a text file in the root of my repo that said:
Would that be sufficient?
That text does not disclaim support, security bugfixes, and future development. On the contrary, all three of those things are probably either heavlily implied or outright stated to be available on the project web site.
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I think it is too long.
> B: Be clearly labelled, in its public-facing information, as being offered as-is, without any implied updates or future development.
Pretty sure every open source license includes this in the warranty line...
No, that’s the legal warranty disclaimer. It has nothing to do with support, security fixes, or future development.
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> Be clearly labelled, in its public-facing information, as being offered as-is
If you read the license (for most licenses anyway), that info is clearly right there.
This is ridiculous because there is no legal or moral obligation from the creator to say anything except maybe adding the license. You as a user can use the given software and probably modify yourself at will due to the permissive license which is the main advantage of OSS. When I get stuff from the charity I do not expect them to provide a return policy and customer service, your analogy is moronic because the thing was done already and you can come back and get a newer thing if it is ready.
The problem is that the barrier to use any software is so low that it attracts people who have no clue and demand support. I am not talking about you, even the larger companies always mention a wish to force smaller developers to patch security issues for free, this is an issue in supply chain security at the moment.
The gist is that you can fix it yourself.
To use any software in these modern times, it’s not enough to simply get a snapshot and use that forever. That time has long gone. Users need updates for whenever the inevitable incompatibilities arise, and since switching to some other software is a lot of work, users need to be able to depend on regular, timely updates. Indeed, many people choose what software they use solely on that basis. Therefore, any software project which presents itself as usable is implying that the project will provide these things.
(This is a bit like how a stable economy depends on there being a crucial threshold number of long-term, high-trust relationships. You cannot have a functioning economy when everybody is always backstabbing everybody else. Similarly, you arguably cannot have a functioning Open Source ecosystem if everybody is just throwing code over the wall all the time.)
> The problem is that the barrier to use any software is so low that it attracts people who have no clue and demand support.
I think this phenomenon is caused by:
1. Some users being a bit whiny and entitled, just like some people are rude to waiters. Some have been taught and brought up to behave this way, and others have just gotten into bad habits.
2. Many developers being overly defensive when presented with legitimate complaints from users. This is just human nature, harmful as it may be.
3. Due to 2., users exaggerate and act rudely when reporting complaints, because they expect pushback from developers. This then exacerbates 2. again, leading to a vicious cycle.
Some developers who are burnt out by 1., and are not realizing what is going on, are, as a way of psychological self-defense, adopting an attitude of “I don’t care about you users, you’ll get nothing and you’ll ******* like it.” This then necessitates the same developers to argue that all users who expect anything are merely “entitled”, because if any user’s expectations would be reasonable, then the developer’s attitude would be unwarranted, and the developers feel that they need that attitude for their own well-being.
None of this is new; the old jargon word “lusers” was frequently used in ages past with contempt and disdain for users.
The feeling of entitlement people have around open source is unsustainable.
Do you have standards? It doesn't sound like you do.
People with healthy boundaries set standards for themselves as far as what they give to others and what treatment they accept in return.
I think the fallacy in your argument is that you're blaming contributors for noticing that they aren't being compensated for the work they've done, rather than blaming others for using that work without giving anything in return. I see your sentiment reflected in society in the way we treat low-wage workers with disdain for not doing more lucrative work. You're applying the principle of rugged individualism to a systems-level problem.
A healthier way to approach this would be to list a number of possible solutions and debate them in an open forum like this. When we find solutions but fail to adopt them, then that's a criticism of our agency. We are all failing ourselves by failing open source contributors. Then we can look beyond that to find the reasons why. Which are obvious because they are the same as with any other power imbalance. The fault lies with the wealthy and powerful people and corporations who profit from free and low-wage labor. The solution is to organize labor into a unified front so that exploitation can no longer happen.
Our failure to solve open source compensation is analogous to failing to stop suffering in developing nations which provide labor and resources for wealthy ones. Your argument places guilt and shame on workers instead of identifying exploitation by the wealthy, which might be better spent on something like an open source endowment or UBI more generally.
I dont think that is what the person you were replying to is saying.
> I think the fallacy in your argument is that you're blaming contributors for noticing that they aren't being compensated for the work they've done, rather than blaming others for using that work without giving anything in return.
Is anyone being forced to work on open source software? Unlike low wage jobs, where you could be forced in order to pay bills, eat, nobody is forcing anyone to work on open source ventures.
Just because you do something useful does not mean you are inherently entitled to compensation in the form you want.
If you are being forced to do something against your will that is bad. If it is some hobby you happen to like doing that is totally ok.
> The solution is to organize labor into a unified front so that exploitation can no longer happen.
Lol. What type of leverage do you think open source devs have to form a union? Open source in many ways is designed to remove all economic leverage from source code. Its not a bug its a feature.
Edit 2: you're right, I read the parent comment backwards. They're saying that people using open source code have no right to place demands on contributors. This is a teachable moment for me, so I'll leave my thought process below, even though it doesn't apply now.
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If I follow your logic, then you're saying that there's no economic incentive to work on open source software, since it's not compensated financially. Which seems to create a paradox:
A) Capitalism doesn't apply to open source software because there's no exchange of capital for labor
B) Capitalism applies to open source software because it generates billions of dollars of revenue for people and corporations
It sounds like the only rational act under capitalism is to not work on open source software, since the work is not compensated.
Meaning that any solution we come up with will act outside of capitalism.
Can you present a solution that works within capitalism to fund open source software?
Edit: I forgot to mention that the primary power of organized labor is to withhold labor until compensated. For open source, that might look like deciding as programmers to withhold all of our contributions until we solve this. Since we won't do that, we're all scabs supporting the status quo.
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> I think the fallacy in your argument is that you're blaming contributors for noticing that they aren't being compensated for the work they've done, rather than blaming others for using that work
That's the exact opposite of what they are doing. They are blaming the users for expecting more than they should. They should expect nothing more than literally just the current version of the code, as is.
Thank you, you're right, I read the parent comment backwards.
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