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Comment by tonyedgecombe

7 days ago

I have a tiny bit of sympathy for this, I have received a bug report that said “Your software doesn’t work”.

I’d always reply though, usually with something equally terse.

Most recently, a github user opened a issue on one of my projects and asked "Why should I use this instead of Y".

As a developer sharing my code online, I don't even know where to begin answering that.

This is typical non-tech spam.

  • No this is a valid request.

    If a user wants to use a piece of software to do A and several different pieces of code do that - why should they choose yours.

    What is your selling point.

    Especially if they have been using the other product why should they switch to yours?

    • If I'm writing FOSS and someone asked me that, I'd just reply with ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

      I'm not making money from it, so trying to convince some random individual to use it is a waste of my time. Sure, I'll describe the features in the README and possibly include comparisons to other software, but I won't go out of my way to convince a specific rando just because they asked.

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