Comment by kawhah
2 years ago
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.
2 years ago
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?
> but what isn't clear to me is why maintainers don't ignore these people.
One reason is that you're being told that that's an awful thing to do by basically every resource on "proper open-source" you can find.
Another is that these people are pretty good at starting shit storms trying to ruin your reputation if you don't comply with their unreasonable demands.
It's also worth nothing that some requests/issues/questions might be reasonable when viewed in isolation but not if there are hundreds of them.
Think for example stuff unrelated to the project but where you as a hacker could nonetheless help because you do know the answers/possess the skill. For me at least, I find it hard to deal with that, because I know that I could in theory help that person. I just can't in practice because time and energy are both finite.
> We are happy to review high quality PRs
Are we though? There's a lot of work attached to reviewing even high-quality PRs. Also, even if the PR is high quality, the maintainers will still be the ones maintaining that new feature so it's still significantly more work.
17 replies →
It's like if you live in a quiet suburb, and someone walks up to your window every night and starts yelling obscenities for an hour or two.
It can be ignored, yes, but the worst offenders go beyond a polite discourse and will send emails to whatever email they can find, DM you on Twitter, Mastodon, etc., and drop weird and annoying comments anywhere they think you have a chance of seeing them.
Some people have thicker skins than others, but it's just a bit tiresome no matter how much you can deflect.
This is something I'd love to see, the problem is that any "pay for features" model runs into serious legal issues:
- for American developers, many of them have provisions in their employment contracts that allow them to do unpaid open source work, but ban any kind of commercial (i.e. in exchange for money) activity. The fact that this reach into off-time by employers is possible is nuts anyway, but doesn't make the problem go away.
- as soon as any kind of money is involved, a lot of jurisdictions have provisions regarding warranties and liabilities - and these can be pretty enormous, see the log4j fallout. Some of these can be put aside by contracts, but nevertheless it's a legal minefield.
- some jurisdictions don't allow you to just take money in exchange for a project, it exposes developers to tax and social security liabilities. Even labeling such stuff as pure "donations" isn't safe if your tax auditor is particularly focused on nailing you.
- what to do if someone from a sanctioned country donates you money? What to do if you're European and get money from someone in Cuba (which is not sanctioned by the EU), but are employed by / work for American companies or intend to travel to the US?
- what to do if some arms manufacturer donates you / funds money for a project that could be used in weapons? Virtually all countries have some sort of equivalent to ITAR regulations that you really don't want to run afoul of.
> but what isn't clear to me is why maintainers don't ignore these people.
There very likely isn't just one reason that applies to all maintainers.
But there are some reasons one can hypothesize that probably apply to some or many maintainers.
One of the best handlings of this I ever saw was on opal, where someone was ranting about a non-software issue calling for the removal of a prominent contributor.
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.
A solution was proposed, the problem was never solved because people generally don't read or believe that social convention doesn't apply to them in this situation.
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.