When you’re talking to an open source dev, just remember that they are literally giving you their time for free, and they are people who don’t like to be treated poorly.
Edit: Just to be clear, I don’t mean any ill will toward the guy. He’s frustrated and he’s just taking it out in the wrong venue at the wrong people, but that doesn’t mean he’s a bad person.
Edit 2: The reinstalling he’s talking about is NPM. So just running npm install. It’s because he tried removing the node_modules directory, which is a reasonable thing to do, but it means you need to reinstall the modules with that command.
Me approaching Foss developer with bug: Pardon me, if you could grace this lowly worm with but a moment of your attention; I with me a bug report, and I believe I have found the section of code responsible. This inadequate being lacks the technical expertise to fix it and would be eternally indebted if you would turn your monumental skills upon its trifling problems. It would please me immensely if my paltry efforts were of some assistance.
This user: SOFTWARE NO WORK FUCK YOU!
And yet, this is the issue that gets a response instead of a silent closed offtopic wontfix.
Even if that was true effectiveness is never acceptable justification for cruelty
Never is a strong word when a collection of people all came together and agreed that Windows 10 should force updates.
Or even worse:
Thanks. Send a complete log of every software on your system, two videos of the bugs in action, and a detailed analysis of what you’ve had for breakfast.
It is, until it isn’t. I’ve seen devs delete or abandon their projects because of too mush abuse. Nobody likes being yelled at. (Unless that’s your kink. I won’t judge.)
The self entitlement in open-source these days never fails to astound me.
As a maintainer of open-source projects, I can confirm… It’s unforunate lol
Nowhere else do people get so much for free and yet be so entitled. It’s rough.
And here I am anxious thinking I might offend the devs so I spend way too much time thinking what I’ve written is not rude
I’ve only had beef with a single dev ever. The maintainer of Prometheus, Brian Brazil, or whatever his name is. His attitude is so shitty towards people proposing actually good ideas that would push his product forward.
I don’t mean any ill will toward the guy. He’s frustrated and he’s just taking it out in the wrong venue at the wrong people, but that doesn’t mean he’s a bad person.
But he is a bad person. He’s being a fucking idiot and being insulting to the person who made the software for him in the first place.
People like that don’t deserve patience and understanding. Perhaps a good response would be “this software is free for you to use, if you don’t like it then fuck off and make your own”.
But he is a bad person.
People like that don’t deserve patience and understanding.
These black and white statements won’t do you or anyone else any good. We understand that an inconsiderate or rude act doesn’t define a person when we can believe that about ourselves and love ourselves despite our many mistakes and cringe-worthy incidents.
When we love ourselves we begin to offer others the same grace and understanding we allow ourselves. We see the myriad reasons we don’t think or act how we’d like to and realize that everyone else’s life is just as difficult and confusing, and often for reasons we’ll never see or understand.
It depends on if the first guy is complaining about having to reinstall this specific software, or if the software borked his entire system to the point that he has to reinstall his entire OS. Because that happened to me once. But in the first scenario he is being a dick, and in the second one not so much.
In this case, in trying to resolve the issue, he deleted his
node_modulesdirectory. So he’s talking about having to reinstall everything by typingnpm installand waiting for it to finish.oh man…
People can be such dicks, you have my sympathy.
I’ve been thinking about open sourcing a Node project of mine recently… concerning that this is the kind of thing to expect
Well, this isn’t usual. This is actually really rare. Almost all of the interactions I have with users of my libraries are great. People are generally appreciative and kind, or at least not rude. This is an outlier, and I try not to let these things sour my experience.
He’s frustrated and he’s being abrasive because of that, but that doesn’t make him a bad person. I try to respond without being rude back, but just stern. Usually when you do that, people will either not respond again or apologize. I’ve never had a user keep being rude, and if I did, I would just ban them.
Sometimes people just kinda forget that on the internet they’re still talking to other real people, you know?
You’re taking a far calmer approach than i could ever take.
You’re lucky. I left FOSS dev because I got tired of my free time being abused by people like the one in your post
I’ve had to adopt a two strikes policy towards these aggressive trolls, who treat you like your their personal servant, especially since they make up like <1% of ppl on issue trackers. After a warning, if they don’t play nice, then they’re out.
It’s the only way to keep the coding experience enjoyable, and not suffer from burnout.
No. It’s provided without warranty nor guarantee that it’ll work or even leave your system intact. That’s the core of most opensource licenses. Dev owes nobody nothing.
I disagree, in neither scenario the open source dev owes him anything. You get to use and modify the software for free, but the flip side is you are entitled to nothing.
Malware is free too
Malware is not usually open source.
You’re not entitled to a working computer once you execute a free program?
I guess you are not entitled free support once you execute a free program
I can’t say I’ve spoken directly to a dev in a situation like that, thankfully, but if that opinion were dominant, FOSS wouldn’t be a thing. Destroying your data or OS is kind of a no-no, whether you pay for the software or not. Obviously, you can’t sue the FOSS dev, but come on, it’d be amazingly shitty if they didn’t even try to help if there’s any evidence it’s their fault.
Do most open source projects damage your computer? It’s obvious they put effort into making usable programs.
Of course not!
Honestly, no. It’s your job to vet the software you run. If it’s open source, you had every chance to make sure it wasn’t going to irreversibly break your system ahead of time.
Alternatively, you could pay money for a solution from a reputable company with support.
You’re implying that to even install the simplest of programs, I’d need to read and understannd many thousands of lines of code, starting with the FOSS project itself and then spidering out to every dependency. This speaks nothing of the fact that it may be written in multiple languages, some of which I am not familiar with, and even if I am, code can be written in ways that’s almost impossible to understand. This might take a week for a 200 line project.
Reminds me of when my employer said they were going to stop using open source software until a team had vetted it completely. Lol, once they talked to engineers that idea died immediately.
This. I swear, some people in the FOSS community seem to be convinced everyone who uses a computer is a developer.
Right? And it seems like no one is interested in understanding my point, most only seem interested in defending developers of FOSS. I understand there is no legal obligation from FOSS devs… That is irrelevant.
I love FOSS. It’s one of the best products of humanity. I am not attacking devs at all…
My point was only that while devs don’t owe anyone anything legally, if the rare edge case happens where their code is destructive by accident, it would be a dick move to ignore complaints about it. I guess because it didn’t spell it all out like this, I “deserved” all the downvotes (on since-deleted comments) and condescending remarks?
Yes I know that if I use Firefox I can’t sue them if somehow they wipe my OS. Yes I know that would probably never happen, it’s extremely unlikely to happen. But if it did, FF owes us at least a response. And I means owes in the sense that it’s the right thing to do, not “if you don’t do it I can sue you”.
Who put the gun to your head and made you run the software though?
The response to this here is absolutely wild. I guess I should expect my machine to get wiped any moment
Whenever you choose to run a program that has full access to parts of your PC that may cause issues, you are the person who chose to do so.
Just run apps in a sandbox if you don’t want to risk having to reinstall your OS in a worst case scenario.
The developer owes you nothing.
That’s absolutely a ridiculous stance. Yes, you can personally go through everything, but there’s also searching around to find out what other people say about it, actually look through the issues people have raised. Some of it applies to proprietary software as well, find out what other people say about the software. You don’t need to do everything yourself, but you do have to take responsibility for trying to make sure it will work as you hope it will.
Whoosh
This is also any and all Firefox support queries in a nutshell.
“OMG THIS BROWSER IS SO SHIT IT ALWAYS BREAKS OR GETS SLOW”… “No I have not changed anything in ˋabout:configˋ, and what I did is definitely not the source of the problem!”… “Yes with a reset config it works fine, I don’t know why, your browser is shit!”
And it’s always the same people who do “hardening” and “privacy enhancement”, having fuck all actual clue what they’re doing but thinking they’re oh so smart. 😑
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