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Comment by CannisterFlux | Hacker News Reader

I realised as I read this post that I have done exactly this on a few occasions. Taken upstream code, forked it, fixed bugs and used it for myself. Usually there's no conspiracy, I just cannot be bothered dealing with "you're doing it wrong" comments when my fix isn't deemed worthy.

The problem I have seen is that certain usually vocal members of a community can have this double-edged helpful-jerk attitude. Most of the time I just lurk on communities, so the jerkiness is rarely if ever even directed at me, but it changes my view of the project to the point where I just don't want to be involved.

The usual pattern is a post or response to a bug report, patch or question that is generally helpful but at the same time needlessly nasty or snarky, and with a I-know-better-than-you attitude. If the community person dislikes the question asked, or the use that people make of their software, why do they take the time to write answers at all? Usually being pleasant is a question of writing less words as well. These people go out of their way to add snark to the response.

This isn't limited to "open source". It is probably just a people problem. I've seen the exact same thing on guitar forums. Members that post helpful replies, but spread a layer of snark over them. You follow their profile and they often have websites with lots of good free information, lessons and whatnot, but here they are, writing twatish answers. It has been a problem on stackoverflow.com too, and they really stirred things up over there recently trying to herd people into being a bit nicer.

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> The usual pattern is a post or response to a bug report, patch or question that is generally helpful but at the same time needlessly nasty or snarky, and with a I-know-better-than-you attitude.

The most infuriating responses come when I've put a bunch of time into constructing a careful bug report (maybe several hours after narrowing down the problem), and some idiot comes along and closes it, telling me to post support questions elsewhere. It usually takes the form of bug report -> here's a workaround -> no, doesn't help -> idiot jumps in and says "Please file support requests elsewhere. I'm closing this."

I’ve discovered that as any project becomes larger and involves more people, they all lead to patterns resembling awful enterprise corporate bureaucracies with the same political and cultural repercussions. Patterns that result in folks filing issues in the wrong categories and issue trackers entirely come from bad / misaligned UX but also because the maintainers and contributors are having difficulty accommodating the workflows of users and new contributors. Jenkins is a project where they outright disabled Github issues and everything goes to the JIRA, for example, but somehow Kubernetes is able to handle some issues via Github at least (but only by sharding from what I observe).

In my experience, the larger the project, the more likely you are to get that type of response.

Small, actively maintained projects are often very welcoming and happy to have any help.

This is surprisingly often true with companies too.

There's BS and cool on both sides of PRs.

- MYOB fail, as mentioned, sigh.

- Closing issues before they're resolved. Proper etiquette is to let the filer close it after it's fixed and working.

- People demanding features or making vague trouble reports.

- Submitting a properly-tested PR that fixes an issue without need for a fix-it issue.

- Committers open to some globally-beneficial change only to change their mind after it's already done.

- People refactoring your commit with something better.

- Rust and a lot of small languages have tiny, good communities of generally humble badasses.

- People changing whitespaces or switching to British grammar. SMH.

I look at it this way: you gotta take the shit with sugar. Not trying to contribute upstream is consuming without producing... I'm against this because it helps no one and it's uncool.

Can you expand the acronyms please? Except BS, I figured that one out

MYOB, Mind Your Own Business

PR pull request

SMH = shake/shaking my head

As a maintainer I've also had weird situations come up where someone suggests something perfectly good, and even includes code with an implementation, maybe even something they've spent significant time on, but even though it's a good idea and potential contribution, it just doesn't "fit" with the idea we're going for.. it's actually hard to say no to people for reasons like, "Your code is good but we don't want it because that's not the right interface according to the use case our software is designed for." Clearly the code is good for the person proposing it, and I can't even reject with the excuse that it's bad code in any way, all I can say is, that's not what we want to do right now. It's kind of heartbreaking to reject things on that basis.

I've even found myself having to reject contributions purely for the reason of, "your code is good but it's too much.. I don't want to maintain that."

Believe me it sucks to reject a significant contribution, but the fact is that what often happens from experience, is that someone scratches their own itch, submits a huge patch, and then walks away once it is accepted. And then it does indeed become my job to maintain a bunch of code that I didn't write and aren't familiar with.

So I find that these silly practical issues crop up a lot that have nothing to do with code quality per se, but more to do with being pragmatic about maintenance and the goals for a given code base. It's hard to know how to give the right answer, socially speaking, and I think I have definitely come off as snarky in the past doing so, but it's not intentional. Sometimes acceptance or rejection simply doesn't depend on the code but on other factors that are hard to convey properly on an online forum.

At least the message for contributors is, small one-off fixes are one thing, but if you're going to spend significant time working on something, please discuss it upstream before proposing a huge patch that might not even be something we want to integrate.

That is somewhat unfortunate, but if I take a bit of time to think about it, it seems like a necessary consequence of a successful open source project/movement. Perhaps, in cases like those, you could find a way to split the base project into two or more modules, making it possible to share code with the new fork, but such splitting has non-negligable cost in terms of ossification of internal APIs and maintenance overhead.

Interesting you say so, in one particular project this has become such a problem that I have indeed been thinking along those lines.. of breaking it up into more than one repository so that people can just build their own extensions and I would just maintain a kind of "kernel interface". I do think it's a useful way to go, but it does take some time to redesign with that in mind. It's hard to know when it's "time" to do it, because it's usually only after a project gets to a certain size and has some popularity that it becomes simultaneously difficult to (a) integrate external work and (b) to rewrite the project to make (a) easier. The only answer in some cases seems to be to start a parallel project, but then you're back to the problem of whether this gets any traction in the community, or is seen as "hostile" somehow.

I think basically the whole point of open source (free software or otherwise) is the ability to edit a program's source code to fit your needs. If your needs are very special, there is no point in trying to merge the changes with upstream or distribute them more widely. If it is too difficult to upstream your code (e.g. because of irritating governance and hoops to jump through), then you don't upstream the code. If you don't agree (philosophically or otherwise) with those running the project, then maybe you also don't want to upstream your work. The majority of code written solves a problem specific to the author. There is no need, responsibility, or moral obligation to make all your code public. Honestly I don't even think that's a good thing.

All of this is how it's supposed to work. You are in control.

Correct me if I'm off-base, anyone, but it appears to me that the point of the original post is to express that, if you run an open source project, and you want to take advantage of people's hard-won experience and energy to the benefit of your project, you may want to focus on having an inviting community. At least, that's how I read it.

That said, of course there's no moral obligation to contribute. However, as an original author of several open source projects, I take this as a helpful lesson around inviting others who don't have a moral obligation to feel welcome to contribute, and even find some way to reward them, even if I can only afford public praise at the time.

Well my comment was kind of generally directed at a few different ideas floating around in the comment thread as well as from the original article, but I do believe that yes the main point of the original post is what you say.

I definitely believe that any open source project should to the best of its ability make it easy for users to contribute back upstream. That requires a welcoming community, a sane design, good documentation, etc. Many projects fail and lose out on worthy contributions as a result. That certainly is sad.

But I just wanted push back against the idea that some have that people should always be contributing their changes upstream. I don't even mean to focus on any moral obligations. As a user of open source software, you should make changes to fit yourself and your needs without regard to others. Sometimes your changes might make sense to upstream, but often they are just changes that you prefer. The real-life parallel would be painting a cool design on your ikea furniture. Just because you like it, doesn't mean ikea needs to know or that you should feel any sort of obligation to tell them or any others about it. It's your furniture and you should make it the way you want it.

Maybe I'm just blabbering, since I don't think we really disagree, but I just want people to remember that open source gives users the freedom to mess with software in whatever way they want without any pressure or need to make it look nice or to give it to others. It's their computer and they can make the software run as they wish.

And as usual, it's a question of degree. If the bulk of development is done on the official repo and people just do occasional private forks for special use cases, I don't think there is a problem.

What's problematic is when the balance shifts and the bulk of interesting developments is done in private forks.

I see this pattern regularly and I always wonder: why would you deny yourself the opportunity to improve?

If you have a patch, and others know how to make it better, why would you forgo that chance to learn something?

What good can possibly come out of "I'll just hide in my shed" and tell nobody about my patch (that is what the OP recommended, invite-only repositories).

You submitting patches has nothing to do with the community. You submitting patches has everything to do with:

  a) improving the patch to maximize its usefulness
  b) the project becoming better
  c) you becoming better
  d) the project taking over maintenance of your patch so you don't have to.

It's a win-win for everybody.

  If you have a patch, and others know how
  to make it better, why would you forgo
  that chance to learn something?

If I have patched the code to scratch an itch of mine, by the time I submit the patch my itch is scratched - no subsequent changes will contribute to scratching my itch, no matter how good they are.

At the same time, many open source projects are subject to constraints or requirements that are entirely reasonable from their perspective but that take time and don't much help or educate me as a one-off contributor.

For example:

* Paperwork like contributor license agreements

* Supporting obsolete (or nearly obsolete) platforms, and avoiding modern language features to maintain that support.

* Compatibility with project features I don't use, but other people do.

* Getting all the integration and test features of a finicky build pipeline to work, not just those needed to make a build.

* Correctly dividing up changes in multiple areas into multiple patches reflecting the fact different changes will need to be reviewed by different people.

* Requirements like code style and automated test coverage that contribute statistically to lower bug counts at the project level, but that don't reveal any bugs in my specific contribution.

* Code structure issues specific to the project, which as a one-shot contributor it isn't productive for the project to educate me about.

* Conflicts with planned future changes that aren't really documented very well anywhere - or that are documented only in places I didn't find, like the archives of a high-traffic mailing list.

In most cases, the process has some hidden steps and hoops which are unrelated to patch.

The patch methodology will be probably criticized. Sometimes this criticism will go beyond the boundaries and leak to personal space of the developer, and the dialog will turn abrasive or abusive.

And a patch written in two days will be revised an revised for weeks. Not all revisions will be made for logical or legitimate reasons.

Then the developer will submit its patch, it'll be accepted at last, and the developer will never patch anything again, for ever. It'll be burnt out in a single patch.

Some communities do this, and often they don't know what they're doing.

I personally wouldn't do kernel patches. Heck, can't dare to ask anything to the list. Because I don't want the harassment. Also there's the silent ignorance in the mailing lists because your question is too basic or uninteresting or just posted to wrong-ish list. That's a different matter, but results in the same avoidance reflex.

Some anecdata:

I tried to submit a patch once (https://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/660921/) - which to me felt exactly as you described. I didn’t get the reply to my questions questioning the review comment (maybe I didn’t understand it completely so was not worthy of a response?).

In any case, luckily that was not in a critical path for me and then I have moved to a different project so I abandoned it - just seemed like a not so productive/happy use of my time.

And now I feel actively disinterested to ever attempt contributing again.

I can see the other side of the coin as well - the need to maintain the code quality, and probably the burnout of multiple “stupid” questions/patches. I can imagine how it gets tiring especially if one does it in their spare time.

Do I have the right to say “they need to be more patient/welcoming”? Probably I don’t - but equally I don’t fancy being someone’s emotional grounding.

So I will rather stay on the sidelines.

> I can see the other side of the coin as well - the need to maintain the code quality, and probably the burnout of multiple “stupid” questions/patches. I can imagine how it gets tiring especially if one does it in their spare time.

It gets tiring only if you despise answering these "basic" and/or seemingly "stupid" questions. In my day job I'm a system administrator of an HPC cluster, and we also do technical support ourselves. Users ask questions "wrong" all the time. Not enough information, seemingly simple details, etc. I personally never get mad at them, because they don't know how to do it better. We generally try to guide them, point to the correct places, test the problem ourselves, and see what happens, but never intentionally harass them.

You can maintain the code quality with a polite "Why this patch didn't pass the inspection" letter. There's a similar effort called "I downvoted because" [0], but even giving links from that page requires some niceness. Just pasting the relevant URL also looks and feels rude.

If a user is intentionally volatile, we defuse them. If they're intentionally malicious, we block/prevent them. If they're intentionally smarmy or snarky, they get polite but firm answers. At the end they cool down, because they cannot fuel their anger with our reactions.

> Do I have the right to say “they need to be more patient/welcoming”? Probably I don’t - but equally I don’t fancy being someone’s emotional grounding.

They don't need to be patient, if one is intentionally testing their patience. They don't need to be (overly) welcoming, but they need to be polite enough to tell that, or point the person to right way. Saying "no" is not a problem, but not pointing the next step is problematic, especially if the asking person doesn't know the better.

At the end, these behaviors are not because of the person asking the question, or sending in that "stupid" patch. It's about the person who's reacting to the patch/question/whatever. They don't like something, or see something and get triggered, then unload all the rage upon the asking person regardless of relevance of the rage.

For one, knowing oneself better is as essential knowing the stuff that you're working on. Having a baseline niceness is a win for everyone, because it makes life much simpler without softening boundaries. In fact, it strengthens them without making them intimidating.

[0] http://idownvotedbecau.se

I am responsible for my emotions, and my reaction to something is my problem. I get this.

Programming is creative. Just like artists, writers, any other creative process. We get emotionally involved with our work and we become emotionally vulnerable when we show our work to others.

So submitting code to the scrutiny of others is a vulnerable space for me. If the reaction of others is "this sucks" then I have a negative emotional reaction to that. I understand that this reaction is my problem, I'm not blaming the other person for their response, but I still have a negative emotional reaction.

I do not want to emotionally disassociate myself from my creative work so that I no longer have this reaction. I enjoy being this emotionally connected to my work.

I'd rather not show my work to others, or to only selected people who I can trust not to respond with something that will hurt me. I know this about myself.

The more I think about it, the less I believe the whole "I am responsible for my emotions". It is true in some situations and not in others. As a strategy, it makes it impossible to adress abusive or manipulative people while it makes it easier for abusive people to get their way. You are responsible for reaction, but certain emotions are perfectly natural and normal.

0.) There are many people who purposely insult others and then brag about it. When I go out of my way to make you pissed off for own pleasure, then blaming you for being angry is unfair. Then there are people who push and see how you react. If you are doormat, you get more abuse. Here insult have purpose.

1.) This ideology is more focused on pretending emotions don't exist or framing you as bad/weak if you have then. But, it allows you to "retaliate" against third parties.

2.) It is asymetric. Insulted person is expected to have perfect emotional control while the lack of such control on the side of the one who insulted you is ignored or seen as strength.

3.) It leaves you with two options - leaving or bending over to abusive people. There is little space for standing for yourself without becoming abusive yourself.

Imagine a group of respectful people competing with each other. Then the abuser comes in and intentionally causes stress and discomfort to competitors. If you don't allow the respectful people to address his behavior or openly talk about its consequences without sounding "weak", then the abuser is in advantage. They spend effort to manage those negative emotions while he does not have to. He is less in advantage where "stop insulting me" or "stop constantly undermine me" are legitimate things to say.

I also don't believe that "I am responsible for my emotions". It frames emotional / emphatic people as weak as you say, however I don't also think that retaliating with anger is a solution to this problem, but I also don't imply pacifism as the solution.

Every kind of bullying is deteriorating and highly damaging. I've experienced this for 10 years straight, and I decided that I will never do anything to anyone that I don't want to experience (Don't sow anything you don't want to reap).

However in real life, we need to protect ourselves against these manipulators and bullies. We can overpower them, we can play their game or we just become too hard to attack. I've chosen the third way. When someone attacks me in any way, I don't provide them any fuel with my anger or sorrow. I give them nothing. If they're criticizing me, I note words (but not the emotions), and give them a hard think. If I can get anything useful from it, I use the advice. If nothing comes out, I throw everything away.

Of course I'm not perfect at this, I also have soft sides. I sometimes short circuit after the event, but I sorted out most problematic parts of my life that way. I even saved my career that way. It's not an easy thing, but it's highly rewarding if you ask me.

I am sorry to hear you were bullied. I also have experienced this.

I know this will be hard to listen to, but it is my truth.

I was bullied because I gave them my power. When I took responsibility for my emotions, and refused to fear them, it all changed. Power comes with responsibility. When I took responsibility for my fear away from them, I could take my power back and it all stopped.

It sounds like victim blaming, I know. "Just ignore them and they'll go away". All that crap. For me, it was more like "no one is ever doing that to me again". I refused to be afraid any more. I would face them, fight them, do whatever it took, take whatever they did to me, but I would not be afraid any more.

I am responsible for my emotions. I refuse to give anyone else that power over me.

I agree with you. It is ok to be angry, but anger does not excuse everything person does and anger does not mean that I am in the right.

I would also add that there are many people who are not bullies and still may do something bully-like without realizing it. I know few people like that - somehow they are not good at seeing your reaction the way others do and are bad at predicting it. With them, if you just let it be, then it get worst. If you openly tell them to stop and explain how it hurts those around, then it gets better.

Even neurotypical people including me can do hurtful things without realizing. Feedback and communication helps.

I am not a perfect human being. I can react in ways that are not ideal when situations trigger my flaws. That's OK, as long as I accept responsibility for that.

I am responsible for my emotions, but that doesn't mean I have to apologise for them. If I think someone is acting like a dick, and my reaction to that is stress and anger, I'm OK with accepting responsibility for my anger and showing it anyway. I am human, I have inappropriate emotions at times.

However, blaming the other person because "they made me feel angry" is not helpful. They acted like a dick, and they have to accept responsibility for that. I got angry, and that's my responsibility. I could have chosen not to get angry, and I refuse to give the power to make that choice to someone who acts like a dick.

Responsibility and authority go together. Accepting authority over my emotions means I have to accept responsibility for them. Refusing to accept responsibility for my emotions also means I'm refusing my authority over my emotions. Giving others control over my emotions is not going to lead to good things.

Disclaimer: I'll intentionally use "you" to address you, since you expressed some emotions, and I'll directly address them, but I won't hurt you.

> I do not want to emotionally disassociate myself from my creative work so that I no longer have this reaction. I enjoy being this emotionally connected to my work.

I also see programming as a form of art, and I'm also attached to my code emotionally, however you need to understand that, when someone says that your code "sucks" it's their point of view. Neither you nor your code sucks. It may not be doing something in a certain way the critical person likes or prefers. Even if your patch is plain wrong, this doesn't change the real value of you or your code. You've put the effort and tried something. You're the man in the arena [0].

If the person is agreeable, you can talk and improve the code and the persons involved in this. If not, do not take the critics' criticisms and move on. Even if your patch or code is wrong, it doesn't give the person the right to hurt you. So don't allow him/her to do so.

The critic might be right in its words, but wrong in its attitude. You can learn to separate the two, and thank for the advice while giving back the thorny part. Yes it's a very hard thing to learn, but when you learn it, you can keep the ability without much maintenance. When you learn this skill, you do not emotionally disconnect from your work. On the contrary, your connection is stronger and the elements cannot affect this connection between you and your work. Also, you have a much pure and powerful kind of empathy as a result of this learning process. Because you can look from the eyes of the critic, with the disconnection of the critic from your life and work, and process this criticism with the emotional connection to your code. This transforms the whole situation into something hard to describe, but it's very powerful indeed. Last but not the least, it's free from the emotional damage that critic deals (knowingly or unknowingly).

Code on, keep creating and at least put it somewhere visible. You don't need to shout about it.

[0] http://www.theodore-roosevelt.com/trsorbonnespeech.html

Yeah, there are strategies for dealing with criticism. I use this a lot when dealing with customers (I love the analogy of the feedback bucket - put the shitty feedback in the bucket and use it to grow roses of insight). It's easier to deal with this kind of criticism, because the customer is always right.

But add the emotional vulnerability to the well-known entitlement stuff ("I used your code in my project and it doesn't work, so you need to fix it"), and the hassle of dealing with other people (ugh), and, well... why bother?

The upside that you describe - or struggle to describe... I've never experienced that. I find myself explaining my code to someone because they criticised it without understanding it, and there's no feelgood there. I wish there was.

> Yeah, there are strategies for dealing with criticism. I use this a lot when dealing with customers (I love the analogy of the feedback bucket - put the shitty feedback in the bucket and use it to grow roses of insight). It's easier to deal with this kind of criticism, because the customer is always right.

That's a good strategy too, however I do not explicitly use the things I said as a "strategy". I always live like that, so it can be said that it's my default mode. However, I need to say I was much like you. With some hard work and determination I've changed myself.

> But add the emotional vulnerability to the well-known entitlement stuff ("I used your code in my project and it doesn't work, so you need to fix it"), and the hassle of dealing with other people (ugh), and, well... why bother?

I wouldn't bother too, but send them a bug report template to fill. If they say it doesn't work, they need to put the money where their mouth is, and tell me exactly why and how it doesn't work.

> The upside that you describe - or struggle to describe... I've never experienced that. I find myself explaining my code to someone because they criticised it without understanding it, and there's no feelgood there. I wish there was.

You're telling yourself. My code didn't suck, but they didn't read/understand it. Don't forget that the problem is on the other side of the fence. You don't need to feel bad, because the other side didn't understand it. It's not because your code sucked. Don't let them throw their frustration to your turf.

> In my day job I'm a system administrator of an HPC cluster, and we also do technical support ourselves.

The difference is that you are paid to do that. You are not helping those people out of personal altruism, so wasted time is not lost. You did a successful job nonetheless.

If I on the other hand like to help people with coding problems in my free time, and they don't even bother to properly format the code they want me to look at, I'm wasting time if I still try to read it. My free time, and other peoples time that would need some help too.

> The difference is that you are paid to do that. You are not helping those people out of personal altruism.

I'm not working as a system administrator for its pay, I work here because I like my job. Payment is a side effect of it. So it's like a paying hobby for me. It also other side benefits like being able to carry my academic knowledge to my work and vice versa.

> , so wasted time is not lost.

I do not consider helping a person to learn something, to show something they don't know, or to point them the right direction as wasted time. It's kind of planting seeds. It may come alive or not. I just put in the effort that I can.

> You did a successful job nonetheless.

Honestly, thanks. :)

> If I on the other hand like to help people with coding problems in my free time, and they don't even bother to properly format the code they want me to look at, I'm wasting time if I still try to read it.

I'd auto-format in Eclipse and try to read for five minutes. If I fail, then I send back my formatting work and politely ask for making it more readable. This is my way of saying no: "Hey I can't help you, but that's what I've done while my time allowed. If you do your part, I'll try again to do my part when I have more free time."

My time, and nobody's time is for free, and using it effectively is very wise, you're right!

I've had a similar experience when submitting a patch for an open source Google product.

Jumped through their hoops, was met with denial and skepticism of a problem hundreds of people were reporting, that is until one of the skeptical project members independently cited a standard that I had cited in my pull request. We go back and forth for two weeks to refine the pull request, where I am doing all of the revisions. Eventually they're given approval and I assume all is well.

About three months went by, their product is still broken so I check on the pull request and it appears that the relevant people tested and approved of my patch... but they wanted a test suite written for it. They expected me to write and submit tests for their broken product after spending a month of my free on their project.

I was left with feeling as though Google employees should just do their jobs if they want their products to work, as I'm not wasting any more of my time by doing work for them for free.

This is a sharp contrast with other projects I've contributed to, where the response has been "Thanks for pointing out a problem with our project, let's do everything we can to fix it" instead of an uphill battle that was my experience with Google.

If they want the tests to be written beforehand by the patch developer, they need to write that in the guidelines. If that isn't present in the guidelines, or they're not accepting patches to testing/building process, they should write these tests themselves.

Otherwise it's just the same thing as child labor. Unethical, ugly, and sad.

The benefit of taking that particular avenue to improve oneself might be overshadowed by the potential downsides of having to deal with toxic people to get there. And that's a personal scale-weighing that everyone has to do for themselves. There's no objective right or wrong in that.

Everyone is toxic to someone. Avoiding every toxic person is just crippiling you socially, professionally. You have to meet challenges head on, or you are just lazy, and blaming the topic du jour. The ideal welcoming working group is a great goal, but we are humans, and always striving. To stop progress because its hard or annoying just shows your character.

> Everyone is toxic to someone.

I'm not known for my positive view of humanity, but I don't believe that's true at all. "Toxic" doesn't apply to anyone short of a true saint. It's meant for people who exhibit specific behaviors that undermine others' confidence, satisfaction, etc. If a person X who seems above average in collaborative and supportive behavior to everyone else has a single bad interaction with another person Y, does that make X toxic? Of course not. It probably means Y is toxic, and is projecting their own toxicity onto others. Who's the lazy one? Who's evading responsibility for their own outcomes? Whose character does that reflect on?

The time spent "improving" in the terms of the project is time not spent improving in areas that matter to you (or your employer) more. If the fix works and the itch is scratched, extra time spent developing specialized knowledge about that project's build/test systems or standards or personalities for is likely not time well spent, especially if the likelihood of submitting a second patch to the same upstream is low. If you plan to keep contributing over the long term then sure, but that's not the only case.

Honestly, aside from issues with the process it's also just embarrassing. IMO, that's what is causing a lot of the issues that are being surfaced these days in oss. No one likes to be told they're ignorant. Add in a smarmy attitude and poor social skills and only the most confident or skilled people will contribute; which isn't a bad thing to be honest.

We've come a long way from the RTFM days but learning something as complicated as programming tends to make people sensitive about what they do and don't know.

It's a delicate balance. On one hand the project and the community benefits from a lot of ideas. On the other hand, a strong ego with poor understanding can not only destroy a project, they can cost a lot of people a lot of time, money, and heartache so some sort of barrier to entry that turns some people away isn't a bad thing.

At the end of the day, it'll all work itself out as long as we keep the projects open and free. Popular projects attract talent which in turn improve those projects.

> Add in a smarmy attitude and poor social skills and only the most confident or skilled people will contribute; which isn't a bad thing to be honest.

Personally I'm playing with computers since Commodore64 days. I'm occasionally publishing papers about algorithms that solve real problems that I develop (just submitted one yesterday). I'm confident about my skills, and generally know about my stuff, however I don't like uncivilized brawl.

So to be able to be a developer whose patches to be accepted, I need to be a person who can put up with snarky comments, and be able to return them with the same level of abusiveness?

Sorry. Life is too short for that.

> Add in a smarmy attitude and poor social skills and only the most confident or skilled people will contribute; which isn't a bad thing to be honest.

It is a bad thing, because the "most confident" and the "most skilled" are almost never the same.

Theoretically, rude gatekeeping can destroy confidence, but it can't really destroy skill. Of course, the rude gatekeepers typically don't recognize skill either...

"...and only the most confident or skilled people will contribute; which isn't a bad thing to be honest...some sort of barrier to entry that turns some people away isn't a bad thing"

Confidence (or as I look at it, social pain threshold) is unrelated to skill.

>If you have a patch, and others know how to make it better, why would you forgo that chance to learn something?

Maybe because there is not much to learn from people who cannot give you feedback about your patch without calling you an idiot, or making sure that they show that they are above your level.

Because in toxic projects, they are not about teaching you something. And because the only thing you learn is to never contribute to a toxic project again.

Also, why don't you try to create a github account, where you disguising yourself anything but a white guy, and start to contribute. Or just ask any female developer about their experiences.

>You submitting patches has nothing to do with the community.

If you seriously believe this is true, you have no idea about software development.

Your patch might not fit the projects guidelines, but work fine for what you are trying to do. Maybe it even is a hack, which only works in your case. There's also the possibility of time pressure, or just not wanting to deal with possibily snarky comments.

Probably because, if there's a real bug, the patch is by definition an improvement even if the whitespace isn't to everybody's liking?

The tech community has pivoted hard to an obsession with the superficial in recent years. I'm not gonna do 10 iterations of catering to someone's personal tastes in order to do them a favor. They can take it or leave it.

It’s also that if the guidelines about the whitespace are so important, just automate the thing.

I like quite a lot the approach taken at my $dayjob: the files that you change must not change if one uses ‘indent’ twice on them (twice because some of indent’s opinions are bistable). And there is a script that brings the non compliant files to compliant state.

So I don’t have to think of whitespacing at all while coding and can make “good” before submitting. And, even if I don’t like that particular style of whitespacing, I do admit the code which is uniformly whitespaced is easier to read and maintain.

I really like how a number of languages now have a code formatter built in (Elixir, Go(?)). I might not always like how it formats my code, but most of the time I do. Furthermore, it:

1) spares everyone a whole bunch of bike-shedding and bickering

2) often teaches me how to better format my code

3) speeds up my work slightly because quite often I can just messily write my code and rely on the formatter to fix it.

There was an upvoted article on HN the other day [1] where the gist of it was:

"If you don't have a separate documentation website for your open-source project, it's not worth my time."

This is as superficial as it gets.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18150876

Wow that whole thread is awful. So much entitlement, so much inaccuracy, so little insight.

I take your point but good documentation is not superficial.

I'm referring to the stipulation that documentation has to be dressed up with a full-blown website.

d is the only one that the people paying me care about.

The benefit of not dealing with upstream is that I can get more done that they do care about.

I also got burned in a case where I was added to a project as a maintainer and then the original maintainer disappeared, 10 years later I am still getting support requests on a project I just submitted bug fixes for.

Even when maintainers are super nice, it's work to get a patch into an acceptable state for a project, and at least to a certain extent it's not clear why that work should always fall on the person who's making the patch for themselves.

If a forked repo solves a problem and keeps it Open Source and available, and their solution genuinely is good and useful for the community, then there's nothing to prevent the original repo from pulling their code and reformatting it or adding tests. Upstream maintainers are totally free to go downstream looking for patches. They don't need to ask anyone's permission or convince somebody else to make a pull request. Just copy the code upstream if you care about it.

I've done this in the past with public projects -- fixed a problem, left a quick note on the original repo saying, "hey, I have solution but it's just for me. You're welcome to adapt it if you think it's worthwhile." I've also done the opposite and worked really hard to get something accepted. I've also walked the middle line, where I coordinated with upstream to contribute to an official API, but at the same time made it clear that my downstream fork was going to diverge and stay specific to my use-case.

It's nice for patches to get merged back upstream, and it's nice for patch writers to put in the effort to do so, but part of the point of Open Source is you don't need to wait for that to happen.

I have no qualms whatsoever about maintaining a personal fork of someone else's software. If I'm patching something to solve one of my problems, I'm going to search for a solution that solves it as specifically and narrowly as possible. I'm not going to worry about what your coding style is or what you'd like the API to look like. Then once my problem is solved, if I have time, I'll think about broadening it or altering it to fit with the overall community.

But that's a separate step that doesn't have to be specifically my chore. Anybody can do it.

It is just a fact of our protective psychological human makeup that we all have fragile egos and energy conservation always on. That will make us insensitive and upset with others (we respond rudely), and keeps us safe by not wasting energy on unimportant things (we don't submit).

Both you as the submitter who doesn't want to deal with the comments, and the person who is complaining back (and to be sensitive myself, I try to remember they may not be conscious of it) are both dealing with that.

For example, think about your job, and how often did you just let things go because you had to 'pick your battles' or even 'just too tired to deal with that'. Bosses do it too. This is human nature.

It is, as you say, a people problem.

I have kind of the opposite experience. When submitting patches or solutions, you often don't get feedback at all, people just seem happy.

In some cases someone arrives and implements a smarter, shorter and more easy to read solution to the problem you addressed that is superior in every way. Puts you down for a moment, but in normal cases there isn't any snark involved at all. I hope it also happens the other way around from time to time. But in general I wouldn't say people are vindictive. It is the internet and the slapfight is forgotten 1.5 minutes after it happened.

Maybe it has something to do with how popular a project is and how often certain question are asked.

Yeah, I've seen both sides of it too. As you say, a lot (the majority?) of projects are really happy to get patches, often rework minor things in the patch instead of telling you to re-do stuff. This is especially true of smaller 1-man shows. If you send a patch for a bug it's either gleefully lapped up and applied, or ignored forever (life happens, I get that, no problem).

The other side isn't always true vindictiveness, just wise-ass level garbage.

Anyway it's turned me off more than a couple of projects, forums and sub-reddits. You get that 1 dude that you see again and again posting newbie put-downs. They are usually not the lead of the project, but certainly a lieutenant-type. Maybe with "mod" privs. A lot of the time the regulars are sycophantic towards this person, to get on their good side I suppose, maybe to see if they too get some recognition or power. It's rather sad to see, but what else can they do? Walk away I guess. And as a lurker it's what I do when I see it.

Also, maybe I read too much into the text. It could just be that text is a really bad media for niceness, and something that would be said out-loud in a different tone comes across as jerky in text.

If the community person dislikes the question asked, or the use that people make of their software, why do they take the time to write answers at all? Usually being pleasant is a question of writing less words as well. These people go out of their way to add snark to the response.

This isn't limited to "open source". It is probably just a people problem.

It's a people problem. In the 70's and 80's, these would've been the kids that would taunt you or worse in the hallways, gym showers and locker rooms. Not literally, exactly. It wouldn't necessarily have been the same people. However, human nature includes a certain degree of aggression and "us vs. them" groupthink. It's only a question of how it gets expressed. We know that such forces can be negative. We also know that such impulses can be channeled for positive ends.

Frequently I do the same - fork, fix, or change, and I'll rarely push it back. Mostly, I don't want to deal with the community, egos, or icons.

A couple of decades ago, it was really bad. I'd keep email addresses and pseudonyms separate for the various projects I was involved in, if only to contribute and not impact my life. To this day, when I push something, I release it as MIT for this reason. Anything I put out there is free for you to scratch your itch, the same way I scratched mine. There's no need to share it back, or file an issue - maintain your own. That way, there's no need to worry about goals or personalities clashing.

I relate to this and am same. I still feel guilt sometime because I release something and work on it for a couple weeks but then I'm usually done. Its likely full of issues but did what I wanted. Sometimes a community forms around it and there is a expectation of continued support from me but that is not my goal. Few people will actually take up this code from what i can tell or its forked and not released. Im generally ok with it but feels like there should be a better path for this stuff.

> just cannot be bothered dealing with "you're doing it wrong" comments when my fix isn't deemed worthy.

Please just post it. Ignore comments. Your fix will most likely prompt them to write their own fix for the same thing in the following weeks or months. They may not even mention you or use your single line of code in their branch but it's you that gave them ideas and belief that problem can be fixed.

If you want to get things done on the internet then post your almost right solution and look at all the people that rush to correct you.

> ... writing twatish answers. It has been a problem on stackoverflow.com too, ...

I'm most annoyed by answers "you shouldn't want to do that" from shallow experts. I can bare "you shouldn't want that, that's a horrible idea because ..., but if you must you could do it like that:" from deep experts.

I can bare the tone if the response contains actual information, but not if it's just the tone.

> This isn't limited to "open source". It is probably just a people problem.

My understanding is that those kinds of "people problems" are exactly what CoCs are attempting to tackle. (Or at least that's one motivation)

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