Comment by julianmarq | Hacker News Reader

Comment by julianmarq | Hacker News Reader

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> If I spend hours building a nice report for you and you won't spend 5 minutes reading it and two minutes responding with "sorry but I'm too busy" then who is the entitled one here? Further for you to look at it as an insult?

You? The other maintainer didn't ask you to do that. You're not entitled to even a minute of another person's time just because you unilaterally decided to dedicate hours of yours on something.

> I rarely even send PRs these days because those often rot for months or years.

Mind you, I've rarely sent PRs, but when I do, I do it with the intention to help. Only around half of the PRs I've ever sent were merged, and most of the others were left open without review. You know what I think about them? Nothing, I just conclude that the maintainer is probably too busy or my proposed changes are not within the goals of the project. I then move on and don't let it eat at me.

> let's be great to one another.

I think that includes giving other maintainers the benefit of the doubt. That includes not taking being ignored as a personal insult, I think.

> You? The other maintainer didn't ask you to do that. You're not entitled to even a minute of another person's time just because you unilaterally decided to dedicate hours of yours on something.

This is just basic human decency. If someone puts in effort to help you or contribute to something you've created, just be a decent person and respond to them. It costs you nothing. There's a difference between being entitled to something and just doing something because it's the right thing to do.

No one is entitled to my gratitude because they hold the door open for me. I didn't ask them to do that. But I say "thank you" anyway because it's the right thing to do and the world would be a worse place if we were all assholes to each other always worrying about what we are and aren't "entitled" to.

This is the whole spirit of open source software. If you don't want to be bothered by other people putting in effort to collaborate with you, then don't make your project open source, or just keep it closed to issues and PRs altogether.

Thank you, very well said. That example was exactly the kind of thing I had in mind.

If we just extended the same human decency that we all do in meat space to cyber space, these things wouldn't be problems.

The problem is, people are no longer extending these basic human decencies to one another in even just meat space.

It’s got nothing to do with basic human decency. A maintainer is donating their time to a project and can work on whatever they feel like. It’s perfectly reasonable to not include any contact information whatsoever or simply stop paying attention when people try and contact them.

OSS isn’t some ongoing obligation, and can freely be ignored for months or years at a time. If you’re not happy, feel free to fork the project.

If you dump some personal code of yours in a public place (which you would have written anyway) can it be really called a donation?

If you don't plan on even considering ongoing issues that are well documented, can you call oneself a "Maintainer"?

It would be very useful to a-priori distinguish the expectations for a given repo, is it "I dumped my personal code, don't bother me" or "this is a maintained project"?

Simply allowing people to see your code doesn’t give them any rights to use it. OSS provides a license that allows you to use software without paying the creator, that’s the donation.

As to being a maintainer, if you’re using that code for something and updating it whenever you personally have a problem that’s still a maintainer. Consider a geologist who created an absurdly accurate GPS for exactly the hardware they have. If’s it’s working for them they might go years without making an update, and that’s fine. Someone saying there is a bug when used on farm equipment simply is’t their problem. Even a different geologist seeing issues south of the equator isn’t their problem. The software is free and almost sufficient, feel free to pay someone if it’s not doing what you want.

The core issue is OSS is free to use and modify, but that also means the maintainer is free of all obligations.

I do not think anybody is making the _legal_ argument that consumers of publicly available software with an associated clear LICENSE file are granted any additional rights. Open Source is much more than what you are suggesting. It's like saying all there is to soccer/football is <first degree technical definition here>.

Just like most things, there is a very important and obvious people/social dimension on top of that.

It's not entirely surprising this is a problem in our industry. After all, Software Engineers are most definitely NOT known for their social skills. The emergent properties of human interactions over time is a very complicated problem.

I think you’re confusion is around the most well known OSS projects which try and increase adoption and generally request donations. That’s a relatively small chunk of the overall OSS community which is well known specially because maintainers have a personal desire or financial incentive to increase adoption.

Far more often projects are released as OSS because sharing a project is a net benefit to the world and costs the donator nothing. That’s really the central idea of the OSS movement, when copying is free it’s easy to be generous. Forcing a social obligation is therefore toxic to the OSS community as releasing software becomes expensive.

> This is just basic human decency. If someone puts in effort to help you or contribute to something you've created, just be a decent person and respond to them. It costs you nothing. There's a difference between being entitled to something and just doing something because it's the right thing to do.

The idea that this costs them nothing is, well, garbage. It costs time and energy, of which many have a very limited supply. What might take you 5 minutes might take another an hour and leave them utterly drained.

I get a dozen issues a day across my projects. I used to respond to all of them daily, then I was so burned out from that chore that I don’t even read my notifications anymore.

Funny how people here think it’s just basic human decency to spend an hour of my time each day responding to people who managed to click a submit button. For every HNer here bragging about how thoughtful their issues are, there are 100s of low effort issues from people who won’t even respond to a follow up.

Running popular projects has shown me there’s no “free” in open source just because literal money isn’t exchanging hands. It’s basically a ddos of your time.

Github needs a feature where you can attach a tip to your issue to compensate the maintainer. I get so much low effort garbage that I would set a $10 minimum on my most popular projects.

People here think bug reports are free labor. What they would know if they ran a project is that most bug reports, even with an issue template, are “it doesnt work wtf.”

To be clear, I was responding to the situation where someone clearly puts effort in creating a high-quality contribution (a PR or bug report) and the maintainer simply ignores them. I think it is the right thing to do to at least acknowledge it and say "Thank you for your contribution! I will review it when I have time".

I don't disagree with you or others on ignoring low-quality, low-effort contributions. I get that people have finite energy and time. Taking 5 seconds to say "thank you" when someone has clearly put in the effort, though, is a no-brainer.

Thank you for this.

I absolute despise this lowest common denominator argument that is so often reiterated in society today: “no one is entitled to my time or energy!!!”

Ok sure, that is technically true, but are you actually doing yourself or anyone else any good by just dissolving good faith like that?

No, what goes around comes around, and you are just contributing to the destruction of community.

That doesn’t mean just go be a doormat for everyone. But to do the opposite and just accuse anyone that even so much as points in your direction of being entitled to your attention, is beyond messed up.

In general, you're free to donate to the maintainers of a project. And arguably it would be "basic human decency" to do so, especially since the maintainers have to spend time reading your issues and PRs. The argument presented here smacks of the type of entitlement that led many other open source developers to leave

I think we are on different pages here. I don’t disagree with what you’re saying, maybe you can clarify please.

For a maintainer to say, or suggest, “don’t bother even opening an issue or PR in my project, because I will take it as an entitled offensive against me,” is just fostering an environment where nobody will open issues or push PRs. Why would they? There is no longer any presumption of good faith discourse there.

> “ The argument presented here smacks of the type of entitlement that led many other open source developers to leave”

Are you trying to say that I am presenting an entitled opinion, because I am saying that there is a give and take to healthy social interaction?

Ignorance over malice. If someone opens a shitty or entitled ticket, teach them why it is such and educate them on how to open a better ticket or steps to take to solve the problem themselves. If they do it again, ok, now you know they are not interacting in good faith. You as a maintainer have that responsibility, just like the user taking advantage of your work has a responsibility to not act entitled to it.

Yes you are taking an entitled opinion in assuming that open source maintainers should invest time in an interaction with your issues and PRs. IT is not a commercial relationship where you have already paid for a support contract. If you think about open source maintainers as the volunteers they usually are, then you'll understand why your argument is entitled.

If that is the stance that an OSS maintainer takes - then they are not a good OSS maintainer! Period.

It is part of the role of a maintainer to _maintain_ the project that they decided themselves to be a part of, or start. That project doesn't exist in a bubble.

If you dont want to maintain something as OSS - then don't push it to Github, or a package registry. Why would you put something on the internet - a social, public place - and then act like you are entitled to a private slice of the web just for you and your rules?

Sounds like quite the entitlement to me, actually.

If you volunteer to be a part of something public, whether you own it or not, you are welcoming the outside world in. Therefore, it is your own doing and responsibility to manage that relationship with the outside world.

> "open source maintainers should invest time in an interaction with your issues and PRs."

Do you not believe that is part of being a maintainer? That statement seems like a pretty accurate description of part of being a maintainer...

> > let's be great to one another.

> I think that includes giving other maintainers the benefit of the doubt. That includes not taking being ignored as a personal insult, I think.

While I wholeheartedly agree with this, and also want everybody to be nice, it's not necessary for open source to work. A maintainer who refuses gratis help in form of bug reports is just a maintainer who leaves gratis things on the table they could pick up. Other projects who take the gratis help will do better. Evolution will weed out the idiots who don't get it.

Think Linux would have gotten big if Linus had said "stupid people, they think I take their contributions for free"? No, he deliberately used a model where thousands of people worldwide contribute to his project for free!

Problem is picking up those gratis things from the table has a cost to the maintainer. And sometimes those gratis things are worth less than that cost. Multiply this hundreds of times and the cost to the maintainer for picking up free things can quickly add up.

And that's why the maintainer is free to ignore them, if they choose to. They should not be hanged for prioritizing their time. Others can pick all that up. Fork the project, use the reported issues and proposed patches, whatnot. Accusing the maintainer of being arrogant for ignoring contributions is as wrong as accusing the contributors for wasting somebody's time.

These recent open source related threads on HN are quite an eye-opener for me how much misunderstood the whole concept is. In that concept, nobody is committing or promising any of their time or energy, so should not get judged for it either. Neither maintainers nor users nor contributors.

He is not demanding you spend minute on his big report. He is asking you not to insult him and not to act as if he demanded salary for it.

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