Dear User of My Open Source Project

http://enfranchisedmind.com/blog/posts/fyi-my-open-source-users/

by blasdel • 17 years ago

70 38 17 years ago

Tichy4• 17 years ago

Dear self-important open source developer: I have never heard about you, and I don't care about your little private project. Good luck with your freelancing work.

P.S.: either you a) don't care what people think about your project, then why the rant or b) you care, then why the rant?

tom_rath4• 17 years ago

...and that, dear readers, is why commercial software can compete against free, open source alternatives.

mapleoin2• 17 years ago

um... no, not really. There is proprietary (you mean proprietary, not commercial) software without any kind of support provided to the user and there is open source software with _commercial_ support.

tom_rath4• 17 years ago

No, I'm speaking to those who are worried about their commercial software not being able to compete with 'free' alternatives.

That '_commerical_' support you're referring to doesn't scale worth a damn, so it's easy to out-compete those folks as a business and provide a superior product.

fauigerzigerk• 17 years ago

Tom didn't say anything about the availability of support options. It's very simple. If I buy something, I know that the vendor is interested in making me happy to some (sometimes minor) degree. If I pick up code that someone dropped on github I cannot make that assumption.

So the two models default to different basic assumptions and that has nothing to do with support contracts being available or not.

crcoffey• 17 years ago

No, not at all? Just because commercial software can and will be catered to the users specific needs, doesn't imply the user always wants to make any form of financial contribution to the desired result.

Nine out of ten times, if you want something, Users tend to google it to look for a share/free/OS version, before they fork out the cash, and if they are lucky enough to find one and get it running, It's always the coders fault that they can't quite make it work for their needs.

iman• 17 years ago

The user referenced in the article who complains and thinks that he deserves everything for free is not the kind of customer you want.

whughes• 17 years ago

If you're getting paid to support that user, then it doesn't matter much what you want. That is the case with a commercial setup.

psadauskas• 17 years ago

Ha! Ever try to get Microsoft to provide /real/ support for a problem in an OS you paid them for?

poppysan• 17 years ago

Hilarious...That's like complaining about the food at a homeless shelter. Its free and, in this situation, unsupported. Buy a commercial product if you want above and beyond customer service...

Tichy4• 17 years ago

I think an important question is: does it matter to me how many people use my (open source) software or not? And it seems to me usually it does matter. More users means higher likelihood for other people to provide patches. It means higher esteem for me, which should translate into higher consulting rates. Therefore I don't quite get the "fuck you, customer" attitude. If you don't care, why even bother to open source the software? Just keep it private on your hard disk.

(Note: I didn't read the whole rant. Presumably there were some obnoxious customers. Whatever - how likely is it that they read his rant and change their ways? Not very likely imo).

RiderOfGiraffes3• 17 years ago

I make some of my code available for others to use as they will. I do not consider myself to be an open-source developer. I really don't care how many people use it, but it's nice that some people find it useful. I have the code, it costs me nothing to make it available, and others think it makes their world better, so that's OK then.

I don't have an aggressive "customer" attitude, but I get pretty annoyed when someone who uses the software then demands that I change something. Not request, not suggest, not offer to help, but demand that it be changed.

I'm not looking for more esteem, better rates, "karma" of any sort, I'm just happy to make it available because I think the world can't be worse off, and might be better off. I really, really don't care how many people use it, and what is clear is that keeping it private on my hard drive means that there is no chance it makes the world a better place.

You don't seem to be able to comprehend the idea that people will sometimes just make their work available to others without any desire or need to recognition or compensation. I think the world would be a better place if people did.

So I do.

Tichy4• 17 years ago

"You don't seem to be able to comprehend the idea that people will sometimes just make their work available to others without any desire or need to recognition or compensation."

If that really were so, then why the rant? So a part of you seems to care. The "demanding" customers are basically just dumb or socially challenged, so I would pity them, not write a long rant.

anatoly• 17 years ago

The "fuck you, customer" is often a different way to raise esteem. The feeling is that if others read about how badass you are at not caring what others think of your projects, they will think you're badass and ask you to do contract work for them. Presumably they'll realize that only a really really uncaring badass person will write a long screed about how they really don't care.

(gah, the original post is such a long exercise is self-important posturing! Complete with careful recitation of all the opensource work he's done. And then I followed the link to the bio site to learn the guy does "Agile coaching". At that point I even briefly considered doing a facepalm gesture).

sutro• 17 years ago

Dear bloggers who begin rants with the word Dear: Please stop.

jodrellblank• 17 years ago

Dear person who read a blog post and whined about it - everything mentioned in this blog post about free software, except about free text instead.

makecheck• 17 years ago

Even if a person is frustrated or doesn't communicate well, he or she is still telling me about a problem. As a developer, I find this much better than not knowing about the issue at all. How many people receive thousands of E-mails for their thousands of downloads? Feedback is rare.

Usually, frustration is rooted elsewhere. The person has something to do, and is annoyed that it (still) can't be done, probably after trying my project along with a number of others. I try not to take this personally.

So my first response is to be civil. I don't even talk about anything mean they might have said, I focus entirely on the problem. I solve that problem, and say "here you are".

The response to this has always been gratitude, and even amazement that I solved the problem. It seems that once the person reaches the point of yelling at a developer, that person has given up and doesn't really expect anything anymore.

A community is built one person at a time.

tjr• 17 years ago

http://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/html_node/Mail.html

When you receive bug reports, keep in mind that bug reports are crucial for your work. If you don't know about problems, you cannot fix them. So always thank each person who sends a bug report.

...

By all means help individual users when you feel like it, if you feel you have the time available. But be careful to limit the amount of time you spend doing this-- don't let it eat away the time you need to maintain the program! Know how to say no; when you are pressed for time, just "thanks for the bug report -- I will fix it" is enough response.

liuliu• 17 years ago

I usually ignore "help request" email or "feature request" one because basically, to reply these emails occupies a lot of time. But "bug fix" email are pretty useful. I do write test cases for code, but a lot bugs are about platform specification, compiler differences which is hard to be found by your own.

m0nty• 17 years ago

I like receiving bug reports. I like even more those cases where people say "the problem is in this bit of code". The thing that put me off doing my open source project is that some people don't have the chops to sys admin their own boxes, and try to get free help from me. They try to make out it's my code of course: "I can't get the database to load into MySQL. Can you fix it?" "It's saying something about 'can't load module nnn'. Is it broken?" I try to be civil but after three or four iterations ("OK, it loads but now I get some error in the logs about 'Can't connect to database'. I wonder what that could be?") well, life's too short and I have actual systems to run, actual bills to pay.

So although your counterpoint is good I would nonetheless say the author is spot on, and there are an awful lot of rude bastards out there who don't deserve free code, let alone free support.

Semiapies• 17 years ago

A "license" like that would be a good thing, I think. Whenever I hear about some potentially useful-to-me 0.1-version OS project, it'd be nice to know things about it. Things like, "Is the developer ever going to spend more than that first weekend poking at it?" or "Does the developer think of this code as similar to a discarded toilet he's left on a curb?"

I get the point about entitled-feeling users, but there's a flip side: in the comments, he goes on about welcoming bug reports, etc. from those users. He wants users to bug-test for him and help him improve his code, but he's not paying them for the QC work any more than they're paying him for coding.

If you release software, for better or worse, you set up some social expectations. If you don't want people complaining to you and wanting bug-fixes and support, either don't release that software or make it abundantly clear in the license, download site, etc. that the software isn't supported.

Dear User of My Open Source Project

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