> So seeing that this person is forcing people to pay to report bugs is absolutely wild.
From your perspective, I can guess that it does seem wild. The issue is that you're getting paid for fixing other people's bugs. He's not.
From your perspective, I can guess that it does seem wild. The issue is that you're getting paid for fixing other people's bugs. He's not.
And, no, we don't fix "other people's bugs" either, just ours.
Or do you think that reading and comprehension are activities that take no time at all, and therefore have no cost attached to them?
I do feel that’s an important point — paid or otherwise. There’s a similarly whiny attitude people have: “I paid $5 for your thing, so you have to do as I say!” I don’t really think the distinction is how much it cost. If you have a support contract that says “in exchange for paying me, I’ll help you with X, Y, and Z”, that’s a different story.
But what I really wanted to remark on: to the point of “activities that take no time at all”, when I report a bug, I often spend hours of my time trying to understand what’s broken, narrowing it down to specific conditions and observations, often a attempting to fix it myself, and then writing everything up and whenever possible including test cases, screenshots, videos, etc. By the time I hit send on that bug, I may have contributed hundreds or thousands of dollars of my time to the project.
It’s also possible to just take 5 seconds to fire off “your stupid app is broken your stupid too fix it”. All I’m saying is that painting all bug reports with the brush of “trying to get free support” discounts the amount of free QA open source projects can benefit from.
Sure, but that was you deciding to do it, and it's commendable.
This is very different from someone emailing you and telling you to (or expecting that you will) donate thousands of dollars of your time to a project.
It's not a bug if it doesn't affect my use-case. It's undefined behaviour at most.
It might even be a bug if you compare to my specification, but, again, unless I have some reason to care about it (money, wanting the project to be good) then it's not a bug.
This aspect is not specific to open source either. In my book, maintainers of proprietary software, and I'm one of those, are also making a huge mistake if they ignore bug reports from users. But in open source, it goes further, by inviting contributions even in form of patches for bugs or improvements. Not allowing any of those is what I call stupid in the above post.