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Comment by mgbmtl | Hacker News Reader

I hate to rant, but there is a weird sense of entitlement in many comments. An assumption that software should "just work", be completely bug free, have the best design, have developers quickly responding to bug reports, etc, while giving away the product for free.

I might not use an office suite very often, but when I do, I'm grateful it exists and is free/libre. Some orgs (gov, companies, service providers/resellers) do rely on LibreOffice, and they should really make sure that core developers can keep on going.

(I work for a free software service provider/reseller and core developer, this comes up regularly)

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This is the de facto complaint of open source software, and initially I thought the entitlement can really only be explained by laziness, after all why don't people just bother to read the source code and contribute the feature they want?

But then I realized its way way more rudimentary than that. A substantial amount of software developers struggle w/ interpersonal communication skills, and so often what may have been intended as a polite feature suggestion came across as entitlement, if not bewilderment that a feature doesn't exist through a poor choice of words combined with a lack of empathy that we see everywhere throughout the internet anyway.

> why don't people just bother to read the source code and contribute the feature they want?

It is a bit far fetched to expect non programmer users to read the source code, much less contribute the feature (i.e. from requirements gathering to feasibility analysis, to design, implementation, testing, and release) isn't it?

That is the kind of work that only a compensated team would do, especially and something as complex as an office productivity suite. In other nonprofit areas, your organizations doing work rely on charitable contributions from donors who share the same interests. Until such a time that such donors exist, it's hard to see how the development model is funded.

> A substantial amount of software developers struggle w/ interpersonal communication skills, and so often what may have been intended as a polite feature suggestion came across as entitlement

They might have interpersonal issues, but it seems like the deeper issue here is more with the incentive model, not with the developers' personality traits.

So you say most of the users can't utilize freedom to change program. Neither coding, not testing, not money, not individually, not collectively.

In other words - they take someones else work for free and give nothing back. And then they complain about quality.

In the early days, one of the things that was heavily hyped by FOSS advocates to drive adoption was the "free as in beer" aspect. It worked but, unsurprisingly, it resulted in a large userbase that only cared that the free beer kept flowing and nothing else about the FOSS philosophy nor contributing.

Well, I believe that FOSS software should "just work", but also that we should "just support it" if we use it - with decent bug reporting always, with QA work if we can spare a bit of time, with coding if we know how and can spare more time, and with some money if we're not poor.

So, I guess I believe in "mutual entitlement".

I think there is a quasi-unique problem with Libreoffice. People love Word and Excel, in ways they don't Windows and other pieces of software that compete with FOSS.

Those two programs are so well polished, user-friendly and powerful, and are what so many people are trained on, that it can be rough transition to LibreOffice.

On the other hand, the idea of FOSS is to put effort of a few for the benefit of them and many more others, a positive sum game.

In some cases this idea is able to deliver, in others it isn't. But the expectations of having a working, maintained and free product are justified to a degree.

To be fair there is simple free open source software that just works, like vim. It is just that people should understand that with complicated and necessarily bloated software which does a lot of things major bugs are inevitable basically fate.

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