How to Use Open Source and Shut the Fuck Up at the Same Time | Hacker News Reader

How to Use Open Source and Shut the Fuck Up at the Same Time

hueniverse.com

39 pointsjosep210 comments

Brilliant.

I can absolutely identify with his point, i get such subliminal aggressive messages/questions too, these people tend to need more and more.

They will email you with questions, when you answer and help them they won't even thank you.

They won't donate.

They won't star your project.

They won't help spread the word.

They just use the shit out of your software and rant when a tiny part doesn't work as they expect.

So i've also decided (just about a week ago) to quit answering, i simply close these issues. Fuck them.

Regarding the ranting, it's a common thing. Let's talk apps. I've seen people giving one star because the app took 5 steps to initialize instead of one. I've seen people rate movies the lowest because "the last 5 minutes of it sucked". It's unfortunate at best but so far they seem to be a very tiny minority.

Can someone compare the level of hate he's describing here with what the average person has to deal with in the enterprise? Maybe it's not bullying, but it's still a high level of stress. Especially on production support rotation.

But at least in the enterprise, you're actually being paid to deal with customers. The author of the article is not being paid - he's generously offering his software to the world for free, and ungrateful people are bullying him.

Also, in companies that are bigger than startups, developers don't have to deal directly with customers that often. We have customer support departments who are trained to talk nicely to demanding customers.

I get the difference in the situation from a macro perspective. But consider being a lead developer, or the person with the batphone that week during an outage.

Executives breathing down your neck demanding answers and things "just work".

I get being paid, and I get assholes in general. I'm just saying from a pure mentality standpoint, it's not 100% opposite.

"I'm just saying from a pure mentality standpoint, it's not 100% opposite."

A customer who has paid a lot of money for a software license and a support contract has the right to demand that you fix it if it doesn't work. They're not being a bully; they're just demanding what they've paid for. They have a right to threaten to take their business elsewhere, and to escalate the issue to your boss if you aren't being helpful. As a developer I need to understand that this customer is paying my salary, and their business may be losing money because of a bug that's my fault. I should have some empathy for their distress.

However, someone who has paid nothing for open source software has no right to the developer's time. They're trying to get something they're not entitled to by bullying a developer. The developer should have no problem telling the user to fuck off.

So it seems to me that in these two situations, both the user and the developer are in very different mental stances.

Often, a company can make use of open source software within enterprise environments without breaking the law - particularly on the back-end. I have been in such a situation many times throughout my career. Open source software's vastly lower barriers to entry and greatly improved platform support are both relatively new phenomena. I have a feeling that the combination of newcomers to the field, plus the greater role open source software plays in corporate environments, are strong contributors to the problem discussed in the article.

Agree with that as well, I don't want it to turn off people from making awesome things. At the same time people need to realize what they're getting into, or just suggest (finally) that people contribute or take the project over.

having worked within the enterprise, and on open source with Eran (the author), both can be very tiring. When it comes to the enterprise, however, it was easier to fix these sort of things, or at the very least prevent them from happening again in the future. People can be repremanded, teams reorged, etc. When it comes to OS, you have the possibility of human garbage coming in and dumping all over the project with little the no recourse outside of banning (which does not stop them from creating new accounts and starting all over again).

The concept of a troll inside of the enterprise is more or less unheard of compared to what a popular piece of OSS can get

Well, can't say I disagree. There is no way I could be a maintainer of a reasonably popular project like Hapi. People are just too terrible. Especially software people.

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