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Comment by bachmeier | Hacker News Reader

Warning: Critical remarks coming

"Python Tutor's large international user base provides a unique platform for my research. This work has collectively led to almost a dozen research papers and several major grants so far."

In other words, he wants the (extremely large) benefits of an open source project but doesn't want to waste his time on those that don't have value to him.

He's running a startup with a $0 price tag rather than an open source project. He doesn't deserve to get any credit, it's something he does purely for his own benefit, and he's giving open source projects in general a bad reputation. Nothing that he's said is a justification for ignoring communication.

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> In other words, he wants the (extremely large) benefits of an open source project but doesn't want to waste his time on those that don't have value to him.

No, he benefits millions of users and is intentionally not taking "the (extremely large) benefits of an open source project" by stating he hasn't the time to deal with outside input.

If the source was closed and people could just use the (free) website nobody would care but since its open source he suddenly owes the world something?

> No, he benefits millions of users and is intentionally not taking "the (extremely large) benefits of an open source project" by stating he hasn't the time to deal with outside input.

I have no idea what this means. He wrote in his post that he does it for his benefit, and that he ignores most people because it doesn't benefit him to respond.

> If the source was closed and people could just use the (free) website nobody would care but since its open source he suddenly owes the world something?

Ignoring sincere communication has nothing to do with a software license. That's being a jerk. The choice of software license doesn't give you a right to be a jerk.

This is yet another one of those situations where someone is well known in the open source world and his fans think that excuses being an asshole.

> He wrote in his post that he does it for his benefit

He benefits from the software existing. He benefits from deriving a paper or two from running the platform. Neither has to do with it being open source.

The open source aspect benefits users only.

> The choice of software license doesn't give you a right to be a jerk.

It doesn't give anybody the right to contact the author, either.

Since "jerk" in this context means "not responding to sincere communication": if you send a sincere email to the CEO of IBM because you have proposals on how to improve SPSS (a tool that, as economist and professor, you're certainly familiar with), do you expect a substantial answer that isn't driven by the CEO's extensive staff and PR department?

Give that man a secretary and PR department and I'm sure he'll answer all communication.

You could hardly create a more perfect example of the entitlement of randoms if you tried.

Decent people: Philip is making this resource freely available to the world. It takes time and effort to maintain, so hey, thanks Philip.

You: Philip is not giving things away for free to my satisfaction.

> entitlement of randoms

This is a very HN-specific view of the world.

In the rest of the world, when someone contacts you with good intentions, you respond. Has nothing to do with entitlement. It's common courtesy.

The open source definition talks a lot about how source code is available. It doesn't talk about being able to contact the author.

The one aspect I'd change as the author is to not host the project on github because that platform seems to suggest a focus on being able to send stuff (patches, issues, ...) around and get reactions (for example it's impossible to disable the pull request UI). But that's a characteristic of GitHub not of Open Source.

I strongly suspect bachmeier maintains no open source, or at least nothing widely used. Anyone who does knows the emails that land in your inbox demanding things.

Reading and categorizing for response 10-50 emails a day has it's own real costs, including the mental ones from getting home from work and then dealing with assholes, even if you do nothing more than hit block. Responding, even if it's a handful a day, is quite expensive. Let alone when you have 10k active users a day. It doesn't take many contacting you to create a serious time cost.

Not a difficult problem to solve at all...

If you're capable of maintaining an open source project, you should be able to set up an email template. And if you're really so busy that you can't be bothered to do that, then put a message on your site telling users that the project is frozen, so you won't respond to email requests. But silence, that's something you do because you want to feel important. Completely unacceptable.

Being nice is not scalable when you are dealing with potentially the whole world.

It's like any celebrity with a twitter handle, they now have to have template twitter reply or its not acceptable?

It's one thing when you have to deal with the support cases in your company when there is hard limit on how many people will be in touch with you. When you are releasing things to the world, there is no such limit. It can be one, it can be one thousand.

I too would like to have something open source one day, if I have something that I think can benefit people. I may not have time to respond to people, given my life and my health, so because of that I should not contribute? And if I did contribute in such circumstances, it is completely unacceptable?

> then put a message on your site telling users that the project is frozen, so you won't respond to email requests.

You're literally writing this under a blog post detailing exactly that and it's also clear from the documentation of the project. What is your complaint here? That he potentially doesn't reply to every single e-mail?

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