Comment by josephg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by josephg | Hacker News Reader

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If you use opensource code but don’t contribute back, you not an equal member of the opensource community.

You’re getting financial benefit from my donated effort. I don’t mind - I wouldn’t opensource my work if this bothered me enough. But GitHub issues opened by leeches have a certain entitled tang to them - “Hey could you donate more of your time so I can make more profit? I won’t pay you. Maybe you should be thanking me for finding problems in your work and pointing them out to you. Get to it!”

The reason you don’t contribute doesn’t matter. You’re profiting from my volunteer work and asking me to volunteer more so you can profit more.

Justify leeching to yourself how you like. But you won’t get respect from me until you contribute back.

And, yes, if you work at an immoral company, that is also absolutely on your hands.

Do you only object to the entitled tone of certain feature requests people have written, or do you see all issues created on your project without a corresponding code change as entitled? If it’s the latter, you can disable Issues on your project, leaving only Pull Requests as an option.

If you disable Issues, I suggest also briefly explaining why you did that in the README to ensure you don’t get do-nothing Pull Requests asking how you’d like bug reports submitted.

The opposite - I prefer it when an issue is opened before the PR is written. That way I have a chance to respond / give feedback on the approach.

I can respond with things like: "Oh, that problem? Yeah there's already code to work around it - here's what you need to do." Or: "You want that feature? I can see why thats valuable to you. I'm sorry but I'm never going to accept a PR from a stranger adding that. I don't need that feature for my workflow, and its complex, so the payoff isn't there for me to maintain the code. Fork my code, or implement that feature in an external library."

I'd much rather turn down a feature request in an issue tracker than turn down work in a PR, after someone has done all the work already for something I'm not going to merge. That feels bad for everyone.

If you write a good issue and take part in the discussion, that signals that you aren't taking my work for granted. Work with me to make a good repro case, and I'll work with you to fix the bug you're running in to.

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