Comment by justsubmit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by justsubmit | Hacker News Reader

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That attitude is very strange to me.

I care about the quality and usefulness of my software. I give it away to give back, because I have been given much.

There are bugs in my software which I will never discover on my own. When a user offers me a bug report or a patch, that user is also giving back. The bug report is a form of contribution. It gives me information I wouldn't otherwise have, which I can use to improve my software, which can make it more reliable and useful to others.

Most users who encounter a bug don't take the time to report it. Those who do report bugs contribute their time and effort, and the fruits of their contributions help not only myself, but other users of the software.

This applies not only to bug reports, but to suggestions and feature requests as well, because all of them can help make the software more useful to others.

The only interaction that has negative value is to be asked a question that's already answered in the documentation. But even those can be valuable when they indicate a weakness in the documentation that makes the information hard to find or understand, which can be improved, which helps other users. And even the questions which are trivially answered by the documentation can lead to valuable interactions later.

So to charge a user for the privilege of interacting with me would be like asking the user to pay me for the privilege of helping me, for the privilege of giving back. It would be rude, and it would deny many the privilege of contributing through the means at their disposal. It would almost be like keeping a fellow human being in a kind of moral debt, rejecting their contributions out-of-hand, leaving them obliged, with no means to repay (or to "pay it forward").

Monetizing our work is not strange. It might require some contortions compared to the most direct approach (step 1. write software. step 2. git push), but that doesn't make it a bad thing.

Here is Charles Dickens writing about his own contortions to monetize his work:

There must be a special design to overcome that specially trying mode of publication, and I cannot better express the difficulty and labour of it than by asking you to turn over any two weekly numbers of "A Tale of Two Cities," or "Great Expectations," [...] Notice how patiently and expressly the [serialized novel] has to be planned for presentation in fragments, and yet for afterwards fusing together as an uninterrupted whole.

I think holding onto bugfixes and feature enhancements and letting Patreon subscribers have first dibs on these makes sense.

Ok, but if I’m using your thing and I’ve found a bug, asking me to jump through some hoops and/or pay to report it means I just won’t bother.

> Monetizing our work is not strange. It might require some contortions compared to the most direct approach (step 1. write software. step 2. git push), but that doesn't make it a bad thing.

You're answering the question you want to answer, not the one that was asked. It's important that you get paid for your work so you can eat, and it's good to figure out ways to monetize your work. Charging people for reporting bugs is strange because knowing about bugs helps you and the rest of your users more than it helps the reporter.

> I think holding onto bugfixes and feature enhancements and letting Patreon subscribers have first dibs on these makes sense.

I think that could make sense, too, but neither of those things are reporting bugs or suggesting features. I don't have a quote.

  There are bugs in my software
  which I will never discover
  on my own. [...] The bug report
  is a form of contribution.

Well, there are at least two ways of viewing a bug report:

1. A bug report is a helpful contribution towards more perfect software, giving the developer new information but no obligation.

For example, pointing out a security bug.

2. A bug report is a request for support, asking the developer to work on a code path they themselves don't use (as if they did, they'd have triggered the bug themselves).

For example, asking them to fix graphics support on 3dfx on Windows NT 4.0 :)

The second one is strange. Just because I tell you your software is broken doesn't obligate you to fix it, and if anybody is confused by that, you can tell them. The weird thing is not having a way to be informed about the bug by unpaid users.

Not only that, writing a useful bug report can involve a surprising amount of work - sometimes far more than is required to write the fix. (For instance, a couple of bug reports I've filed against Pulseaudio fall firmly into that category. They were obnoxious, system-specific crashes that were a pain to pin down and would probably be really hard to reproduce elsewhere, but once pinned down there was an obvious one-line fix for each.)

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