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submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by hperrin@lemmy.world to c/opensource@lemmy.ml

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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.

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[-] naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.com 214 points 10 months ago

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!

[-] ggppjj@lemmy.world 86 points 10 months ago

And yet, this is the issue that gets a response instead of a silent closed offtopic wontfix.

[-] naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.com 46 points 10 months ago

Even if that was true effectiveness is never acceptable justification for cruelty

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[-] NotJustForMe@lemmy.ml 23 points 10 months ago

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.

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[-] tutus@links.hackliberty.org 110 points 10 months ago

The self entitlement in open-source these days never fails to astound me.

[-] ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml 38 points 10 months ago

As a maintainer of open-source projects, I can confirm... It's unforunate lol

[-] mastefetri@infosec.pub 79 points 10 months ago

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.

[-] hperrin@lemmy.world 76 points 10 months ago

In this case, in trying to resolve the issue, he deleted his node_modules directory. So he’s talking about having to reinstall everything by typing npm install and waiting for it to finish.

[-] FrostyCaveman@lemm.ee 34 points 10 months ago

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

[-] hperrin@lemmy.world 32 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

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?

[-] Irelephant@lemm.ee 2 points 2 days ago

You're taking a far calmer approach than i could ever take.

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[-] appel@lemmy.ml 41 points 10 months ago

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.

[-] Raxiel@lemmy.world 30 points 10 months ago

Malware is free too

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[-] RovingFox@infosec.pub 19 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

You are entitled to the truth. If the dev knows their software could have very damaging effects then that should be front and center on the software page.

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[-] Grain9325@lemmy.ml 79 points 10 months ago

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

[-] platypus_plumba@lemmy.world 28 points 10 months ago

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.

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[-] KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml 67 points 10 months ago

YOU 👏 ARE 👏 NOT 👏 OWED 👏 CUSTOMER 👏 SERVICE 👏 FOR 👏 USING 👏 THIS 👏 SOFTWARE 👏

YOU 👏 ARE 👏 NOT 👏 OWED 👏 A 👏 WARRANTY 👏

Don't like it? Pay for your software :)

[-] dannym@lemmy.escapebigtech.info 48 points 10 months ago

I agree, BUT, you should pay anyways. FOSS developers should be paid

[-] DasAlbatross@lemmy.world 19 points 10 months ago

Show me your winrar license!

[-] baseless_discourse@mander.xyz 46 points 10 months ago

It is not FOSS, so I don't pay for it. Checkmate :)

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[-] gomp@lemmy.ml 49 points 10 months ago

User: "I have to waste my whole life fixing this" Dev: "you are complaining that you have to spend a few minutes"

Savage.

[-] CaptDust@sh.itjust.works 45 points 10 months ago

You are wasting my time! I demand a refund, where is open source's manager!?

[-] Carighan@lemmy.world 43 points 10 months ago

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. 😑

[-] IgnacioM@lemmy.ml 40 points 10 months ago

I see this in the comments section of Skyrim mods and it pisses me off so much

[-] HiddenLayer5@lemmy.ml 44 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Worse, I see this with Fediverse platforms like Lemmy. During the initial Reddit influx so many people expected the exact level of polish and user experience as Reddit and there were tons of threads (on Lemmy itself) basically complaining how much Lemmy "sucks" compared to Reddit, despite them coming over to Lemmy because Reddit was being enshitified. Same with Mastodon when the Twitter people were coming over.

[-] LordKitsuna@lemmy.world 24 points 10 months ago

I mean to be fair it's still terrible. Better than the early days and in my opinion better than using Reddit which is why I'm here. But basic functionality is just awful. Trying to discover new content outside of your particular instances incredibly tedious. So many large instances won't stop trigger happy Banning practically every other goddamn instance out there which isn't helping. The whole thing that originally made Reddit popular was that it was an easy place to go to find almost any topic of Interest but I now have to hunt through many different instances to potentially find what I'm looking for on top of that the community for any one particular interest could easily be scattered across multiple different instances that don't Federate with each other and if I subscribe to all of them I'm going to likely be subjected to a lot of repeating posts

I fully understand why a lot of people were not on board with that I put up with it because I hate Reddit more than I hate that but a lot of people will not share that opinion

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[-] OnlineAccount150@lemmy.world 36 points 10 months ago

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".

[-] ISOmorph@feddit.de 42 points 10 months ago

Everyone without exception has had moments of weakness where they lashed out at something or someone wrongfully. That's a bad deed but that can't be the definition of a bad person.

Especially in this context. The dude isn't really attacking the dev directly. He actually might just be venting. I wouldn't do that like that but you really can't assume anything from such a short exchange.

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[-] mako@lemmy.today 20 points 10 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

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.

[-] feoh@lemmy.ml 28 points 10 months ago

Couldn't agree more.

For what it's worth I think Brett Cannon wrote one of the best posts ever on the social contract of open source and how Not To Be That Guy :)

https://snarky.ca/the-social-contract-of-open-source/

Should be required reading IMO for anyone ever on Github :P

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[-] stevedidWHAT@lemmy.world 20 points 10 months ago

When you have blocked most of the troll instances and have no idea what’s going on in these comments

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[-] NotJustForMe@lemmy.ml 20 points 10 months ago

Hehe, sometimes I wish that I could be snarky like that. ;) Good for you.

I have been told by numerous people these days that there are no free things in life. I write and contribute to FOSS software, and had that exact discussion.

Apparently, I do it to feel good, and for the prestige, a reward in itself. Also, I probably want to make up for something.

"Doing something for free is no excuse to do it badly."

Some others don't even know what "free" means." And some don't believe it at all, that someone is paying me. Probably thinking about influencers or something. Perhaps they saw an ad somewhere and believed I'd see any of that revenue. ;)

I just went with posting the wiki entry about FOSS, and my ko-fi page, and thanked them for their interest. The first two, because they genuinely didn't know any better, and the third because, well, at least that one is clear. Every user is a tester. Testing is good.

[-] chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 19 points 10 months ago

Being polite is better than not being polite, but the way I see it, all user complaints are valid and are better not taken personally if possible. Maybe you as the developer didn't do anything wrong that contributed to their problem, or are not actually in a position to resolve whatever their problem is, but it's worth keeping in mind the bigger picture: how well peoples computers work to benefit their lives.

If someone is getting upset that they have to spend time troubleshooting, maybe because they didn't understand something or made a mistake, there's definitely other people going through the exact same less-than-ideal experience and not saying anything about it. That's information about the state of how well things are working and it's better for it to be out there in some form than not.

[-] hperrin@lemmy.world 20 points 10 months ago

Yeah, I didn’t take it personally. He’s just venting, but doing it toward the person trying to help you is unhelpful. That’s why I posted here, basically saying to remember that you’re talking to a person, not a punching bag.

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[-] KarnaSubarna@lemmy.ml 18 points 10 months ago

Would it be OK if I will be that guy when ranting about NVIDIA Linux drives? Asking for a friend 😉

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