Opensource is undeniably a boon to the world. Without it, not only would there be few to no viable options to tech giants, competition would be rendered much more difficult. Fledgling companies would either have to pay for licensed code or implement everything themselves and that would lock out many from even starting companies and dare I say it, even programming as a whole.

But for all the good it has done, there is one thing (amongst many others) that irks me about the opensource community: the phrase "why don't you just...". It is uttered so easily and so thoughtlessly, as if the other person is either too dumb to have considered it, too lazy to have looked it up, or just unwilling to admit it's the right way to do things.

• I can't figure out how to do X: why don't you just do Y?
• Bug X has been hampering me: why don't you just fix it?
• Software X has been crashing and I don't know why: why don't you just....

We could go on and on. Yes, of course, people new to opensource or software in general have trouble voicing their thoughts and approaching problems in the way we software developers are used to. We have experienced the pain of having to track down the source of a bug, had to dig through somebody else's code, read terrible documentation (and consider ourselves lucky it even exists), basically, we have been through the baptism of fire.

Having gone through the hardships, we forget what it was like when we first started and what it was like to acquire the knowledge we have. To some, going through the fire must be the only way because "if I suffered, so should you"; a self-righteous, unsympathetic notion I wholeheartedly loathe.

How to improve

Some might not actually mean it badly, but "just" don't know how to express themselves better. To those who do actually want to help and not sound belittling, please do consider alternative wording:

• Have you thought of ...
• Could you try ... and get back with the results?
• I've had success with ...., maybe that could work for you
• I think this could help ...

If you are one of those people though who genuinely don't see a problem with it, why don't you just understand?