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Comment by hacknat | Hacker News Reader

When the last discussion of X being abandon-ware came up one of the things I wanted to say, being the creator of a highly used open source project myself, is that people are ultimately responsible for software. I was going to speculate that the maintainer of X might be burnt out and that none of us have any right to his free labour, and that the people whining should probably step up or shut up.

Open source software is also free (as in beer) software.

There's a word for people who complain about free things.

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You miss the point.

The problem is not wayland. I root for wayland and I hope it'll progress steadily to maturity.

The problem is getting pushed to drop my well-working Xorg-based setup for some wayland-based setup that can't run the application I use daily and that I've been running for years.

I'm okay with wayland, but I have a problem with people telling me "oh just drop that".

I'm fairly sure you missed his point. Entirely.

No, GGP is saying that we (users) have no right to complain about a FOSS developer abandoning their project since we don't compensate them for it.

GP is saying yeah, that's great and all, but other people try to push everyone to switch to Wayland because <reasons>. The Wayland ecosystem simply isn't there yet though; they're hawking a broken solution.

It's perfectly fine for a FOSS developer to walk away from any given project. When third parties come along and frame things as though the only option is to switch to a broken "solution" it derails the discussion. We (ie the community at large) should be having much broader discussions about both how to keep maintenance going as well as what's needed to actually make the replacement viable (so we can maybe switch to it later).

It is not Waylands fault that it serves same niche as X.Org.

People who had objections against systemd maintained init systems [1], created new distributions [2]. I do not pretend there are no problems with systemd but it serves my (quite common) needs. And the way distributions shows some people were burnt out.

If you need X.Org (and I do), speak how to help X.Org.

Some people needs covered by Wayland. It is not their fault.

Distributions default may be questionable, it is distributions problem not Waylands. I use Arch Linux, no default, no problems.

[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Init

[2] https://devuan.org/

I think we're all rooting for Wayland, but we also like to get work done and like the stability of xorg. I hope someone can pick it up and keep it going until Wayland is 100%

I don't see anyone complaining that X isn't being maintained.

Only that they'd rather use (unmaintained) X over Wayland due to numerous shortcomings in wayland that are practically unfixable (because they're intentional design choices, or because they're a result of the fragmentation resulting from wayland's design choices).

What new features have even been added to X lately?

It is fine. It is done. Maybe something better will come along at some point, but we could just keep using it like this indefinitely.

Trying to shaming critics into silence might suppress their criticism, but it won't make them like you.

I'm not trying to shame anyone into silence. I'm not trying to shame anyone. However, I would like to see people complain less and act more. Being on the other side of open source software is eye-opening. It can be very disheartening to get mostly negative feedback for something done out of passion (even if you might make a bit of money for it).

It's good to hear you aren't trying to shame anybody. Incidentally, what is the word for people who complain about free things?

Well there, I was being a bit prickly... It's not a nice word, I'll leave it to everyone's imagination.

> There's a word for people who complain about free things.

The post and comments are free, yet here you are complaining. Consider why you think that's okay, and you'll understand.

A post and comment today is by necessity an active effort; judging the quality of an ongoing effort on a project and judging why there isn’t an ongoing effort on the project are two very different things.

What if you write a comment about it?

> There's a word for people who complain about free things.

You don't complain about the weather?

I don't think I do (I'm generally not easily put out by weather), but I would argue that the weather isn't free. I have to survive and deal with weather (clothes, shelter, etc) no matter where I live or what I do.

Well, it's free as in free beer. I'm not paying for the weather, but I still complain about it.

Do you complain about people building new shelter (for free)? The one (also free) we are using is impossible to fix though some people still maintain it.

Most (almost all) of the X.org and Wayland developers are paid for their work.

Not really. There are hundreds of contributors not paid by anyone. Until 1 year ago I wasn't paid for my Wayland-related work. I'm now very lucky to have a company sponsor my contributions, but that's far from being the case of everybody.

Even if all developers were paid, they wouldn't be paid _by users_. It means the developers don't owe the users anything.

“You’re not owed anything,” from the developers of a flailing project to its users, is a red flag.

Those users are the target market that those companies are interested in pleasing. It’s not about “owing” or not. It’s about delivering something that people want to use or not. If you fail, the users will go elsewhere. You don’t have to care; you might develop the software for your own personal gratification. But people are going to share their dissatisfaction and might very well vote with their feet. And it’s possible that, even if they don’t, your work makes the world a worse place. No, no one can sue you or call you a cheat for doing a bad job, but they don’t have to like it either.

> Those users are the target market that those companies are interested in pleasing.

Not really, no. My company (SourceHut) has nothing to do with Wayland and is just sponsoring me for working on open-source software (_any_ open-source software). A few other developers are working for Collabora, which mainly focuses on Wayland for embedded use-cases. So, none of these companies have a real interest in pleasing desktop users.

Regardless, it doesn't mean that I personally don't care about my users, or that I want to fight against them. It's just that if you don't like something, you need to step up and do something about it to improve the situation, instead of just complaining.

Maintainers are scarce.

> it’s possible that […] your work makes the world a worse place

Always great to hear that…

From a fellow maintainer of open source software (currently not being paid for the work at all) - I agree 100%.

Users are always demanding things: new features (which sometimes are very bad ideas), merging patches (which sometimes were never tested), expecting answers for questions that were asked and answered thousands of times before…

> It's just that if you don't like something, you need to step up and do something about it to improve the situation, instead of just complaining.

Exactly. Users who want to say on X (for whatever reason) should start contributing instead of spending time blaming the devs. If they want to switch to Wayland, but are missing something - they should work towards fixing it instead of dragging everyone else back.

> expecting answers for questions that were asked and answered thousands of times before

I don't mean to seem ungrateful for the work that open source maintainers do every day, but I think this sort of complaint is usually a symptom of a problem with either the documentation or the interface being unclear. These pain points are usually an opportunity for improvement in the product. On the other hand, there are probably more such opportunities than there are available maintainers...

But then the only users who get the features they want are programmers, who are a fairly atypical type of user. I understand that you don't owe users anything, but if you don't want to create software that's useful and pleasing to them, why bother creating open source software at all. You could get the same enjoyment from coding for profit or doing logic puzzles.

Hire, we have money for that specific reason.

> why bother creating open source software at all.

I create features for myself, I share it for free, that's gift, not pleasing.

Thank you for sway and wlroots. You, Drew, and others have been doing an amazing job. For every complainer there are many more in the silent majority who simply use and enjoy the products of your hard work.

> > it’s possible that […] your work makes the world a worse place > > Always great to hear that…

Painful, but it is true.

Free Software development is awkward in this respect. Both developers and users feel as if they are doing something virtuous, but it's unclear to what extent the contributions of either party help the other (or anyone else).

Meanwhile the presence of this self-conscious feeling of virtue makes transactions difficult, as every party feels they begin by deserving something out of it. So Free Software users are more demanding and aggressive than users of proprietary software, and Free Software developers are more prickly.

Loss of ego is absolutely essential here.

(More on-topic, this series of HN posts about X and Wayland has prompted me, a long-time holdout X user, to experiment again with switching one laptop to Wayland. It's massively better than the last time I tried it, and I'll probably leave this laptop like this unless something goes awfully wrong. Thank you, unappreciated Wayland developers.)

I am surprised. The system I use is someone else work. I've brought nothing, got it for free.

Demanding users I see looks like spoiled web users. They expect free services, they pay with privacy or are clever enough not to pay (adblock). But Free Software does not sell their data.

Or they compare to Microsoft Windows and Apple macOS, quite profitable companies. But Free Software does not acquire telemetry, does not sell hardware or bundled services. There are some private companies (Red Hat, Canonical, Mozilla), their difference from my industry (web development) is they ship source.

There are hundreds of low-volume contributors not paid by anyone. The project would continue without them. Most regular developers, including you, are paid.

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