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Comment by rmunn

16 hours ago

> ... numerous bugs that have gone unaddressed for months that people in their target market could fix.

THIS. I get so annoyed when there's a longstanding bug that I know how to fix, the fix would be easy for me, but I'm not given the access I need in order to fix it.

For example, I use Docker Desktop on Linux rather than native Docker, because other team members (on Windows) use it, and there were some quirks in how it handled file permissions that differed from Linux-native Docker; after one too many times trying to sort out the issues, my team lead said, "Just use Docker Desktop so you have the same setup as everyone else, I don't want to spend more time on permissions issues that only affect one dev on the team". So I switched.

But there's a bug in Docker Desktop that was bugging me for the longest time. If you quit Docker Desktop, all your terminals would go away. I eventually figured out that this only happened to gnome-terminal, because Docker Desktop was trying to kill the instance of gnome-terminal that it kicked off for its internal terminal functionality, and getting the logic wrong. Once I switched to Ghostty, I stopped having the issue. But the bug has persisted for over three years (https://github.com/docker/desktop-linux/issues/109 was reported on Dec 27, 2022) without ever being resolved, because 1) it's just not a huge priority for the Docker Desktop team (who aren't experiencing it), and 2) the people for whom it IS a huge priority (because it's bothering them a lot) aren't allowed to fix it.

Though what's worse is a project that is open-source, has open PRs fixing a bug, and lets those PRs go unaddressed, eventually posting a notice in their repo that they're no longer accepting PRs because their team is focusing on other things right now. (Cough, cough, githubactions...)

> I get so annoyed when there's a longstanding bug that I know how to fix, the fix would be easy for me, but I'm not given the access I need in order to fix it.

This exact frustration (in his case, with a printer driver) is responsible for provoking RMS to kick off the free software movement.