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Comment by lexpar | Hacker News Reader

Reitz really does not come off looking very good here.

I was always a little suspicious of the set of libraries he maintains - the documentation pages are so slick that I begin to wonder if this is a software package or a lifestyle upgrade.

Anecdotally, I was at one point in an informal business relationship with someone who has bipolar disorder and I had a very similar experience when I attempted to formalize our procedures for collecting and recording income. This was in a band (garage bands seemingly not that different from OSS) - so we're talking a few hundred dollars a month going in to one person's checking account. I thought we'd all feel better if we knew exactly how much money we were making and how it was being spent. Had a similar set of objections from my colleague to this kind of openness.

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> I was always a little suspicious of the set of libraries he maintains - the documentation pages are so slick that I begin to wonder if this is a software package or a lifestyle upgrade.

Does that mean bad documentation is a good thing? Not sure if serious...

That said, there are so many red flags in this whole story that I can't tell why the whole thing is only being revealed today. It seems that, as the person who was actually working on a crowdfunded feature, OP should have disclosed the potential issues to the community as soon as he became conclusively aware of them. Much of the damage would've been repaired a lot more smoothly, had he done so.

I wish I could upvote the half of this comment that questions the wisdom of seeing good docs as a bad signal, and not upvote the part about not disclosing these issues earlier.

This same question comes up when people reveal abuse (of any kind) or other traumatic experiences.

People need time to process some events, and when you're going through some interpersonal trouble, you may think this (is your fault|will go away|is not a big problem|has been solved).

It sounds like Smith gave Reitz the benefit of the doubt until he stopped responding and deleted the fundraising page. When should he have come forward?

>OP should have disclosed the potential issues to the community as soon as he became conclusively aware of them.

Sure, but that's ideal. In practice, humans frequently delay or completely forgo sounding the alarm when there's a problem. Having not raised concerns immediately isn't out of the ordinary; for myriad of reasons, it occurs everyday.

So instead of rebuking the author, consider _why_ it wasn't immediately brought to the community's attention (or maybe it was, but not to the degree we see here)

> a software package or a lifestyle upgrade.

I'm unclear what you mean by this. Could you clarify?

I meant there's an "infomercial" tone to a lot of the docs, (claiming the other ways are broken, a list of testimonials, etc).

I think it's a bit odd. I wasn't trying to say that good documentation makes me suspicious, but this very heavy handed advertising up front does.

I know it's partly a joke, but it's not just one ore two lines.

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