Comment by hnthrowaway0315
10 months ago
> primarily due to the very large fraction of entitled users
I think anyone working in serious open source projects just need to learn to ignore those users. I definitely would have the attitude of "I'm perfectly fine if no one uses my product" and have a lot of fun banning entitled users left and right.
That is why I absolute love the quote from FFmpeg maintainers towards a drive-by complainer:
Talk is cheap, send patches.
https://x.com/FFmpeg/status/1762805900035686805
I see a lot of FOSS maintainers continue to engage and defend themselves against people who have demonstrated themselves as unwilling to contribute in any way, yet expecting that free work be done for them. I wish more open source devs will keep in mind that FOSS work is a gift they're sending out into the world, and it's a common good that anyone can contribute to. That is not to say ignore all criticism or user requests, just that you hold absolutely no responsibility to placate emotionally draining people - the project is just as much their responsibility as yours.
Yeah, 100%. Large successful FOSS eventually needs someone like Linus who can just brush away arguments that can bog down the project. It's almost like a military operation -- armies need to move forward instead of bogging down. And in the case of Linux that's perhaps even more true, because the world literally runs on it.
I don't agree with Linus all the time (mostly because I don't have the technical knowledge to agree with), but I 100% agree to his attitude. I hope other large FOSS project maintainers have the same mindset.
Easier said than done. If you care about users, and then realize most of them are jerks, it’s deflating. Maybe the secret is to not care about users, but the risk is that you end up doing self-gratifying work that leads nowhere.
Not exactly the same but being a mod made me realize the same, people will 100% treat you like a whole other being in a dehumanizing way, if you're just a passionate person about the topic you get whiplash at first.
Yeah, I agree. Maybe that's why I'm not doing great work -- I simply don't care about users. But again, you don't have to care about all users. You only need to care about the ones that have the same mindset. That's why I think working in smaller communities is better. Asahi Linux and Rust in Linux are the worst projects in that perspective because they both try to touch too many users.
But again, maybe they can hire someone like me, whose sole job is to block the very worst entitled users.
To me, unless there is an exchange of money and a signed statement of work, I have absolutely zero entitlement as a user. And the maintainers are well within their rights (by law and social contract) to tell me to go away. I wish this was a more adopted mindset.
It’s why things like CentOS being abandoned, terraform licensing, et. al. never bothered me. I’m not paying them, so :shrug:.