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Comment by danbmil99 | Hacker News Reader

This may be an obvious point but how can you say you failed when due to the fact that it's open source, anybody could check out the code and start supporting it?

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How about the insane entitlement that many devs have when it comes to open source? Getting bombarded with requests and angry emails from people who demand free support and bug fixes can burn anyone out.

I think Github can be a positive force for change here. Redesign the UI to encourage donations, to encourage people to get involved in project work, to write less hostile issues, etc. If devs and designers can weaponize UI to create addiction, anxiety and FOMO, maybe we can use the same tools for good for once.

This! Several of my github repos now have a disclaimer that says "if this doesn't work, don't send me insulting emails"

It's especially bad if a big company links to you from their tutorial or in their add-on catalogue because then some of their customers will feel like your open source is part of the commercial offering that they bought. So then you're forced to do open source support for entitled aholes and someone else is cashing in on your work.

> So then you're forced to do open source support for entitled aholes

I had no opportunity to do it so far, but what is wrong with simply banning such people and closing tickets (with note that this issue is closed for rude behavior, not WONTFIXed)?

I would certainly not feel forced to support them.

I wonder if this is a back-firing of the push for people to be "nice" and "professional".

Open source maintainers used to have the sterotype of being rather harsh, and basically telling people to f off if they had stupid questions, didn't RTFM or didn't follow cultural norms. And dont get me wrong, there's a lot wrong with that, but maybe it was also that way for a reason.

Agree. I'm active in some communities that are unfriendly if not outright hostile towards newcomers.

I'm sure they lose a good amount of potential contributers that way. But the few newcomers that remain are highly motivated.

Now that I think of it, that's also my experience. If I really need a project to do whatever (and can't implement the feature myself), I shut up, let the horrible attitude wash over me and put hours of effort into testing and providing helpful information, and maintainers usually mellow out eventually. If I hadn't done all of that work, the maintainer would have had to do it. Sure, they're much better equipped to do it and can probably do it in a quarter of the time it takes me, but multiplied by fifty tickets... Oof.

Nice professional people have large backlogs ignored for years, say no to requests or delay work. Otherwise said, being nice and professional does not imply you will immediately implement every feature request or bug report. It does not imply you will not block/mute abusive people.

Being nice and professional just means smiling as you get a dumb request and being open about your intent to prioritize the request alongside everything else.

You can be harsh in a nice and professional way though.

I can't second this enough, and it's the other side of that whole "put your code on Github and use it as a resume". If I'm looking to hire someone, and I look at their Github repository and it's full of nasty, unprofessional responses to PRs and such, it's a pretty safe bet I don't need that attitude on my team.

In the 1990s, the perl and python communities both had to cope with an endless stream of novice confusion. One grew community norms which included recreational disparagement. The other, in part in reaction, was explicit and firm: if you can't be polite and professional just now, your contribution to the community can wait. The contrast between the two cultures was very dramatic.

I don't think some UI tweaks are going to fix this sense of entitlement.

Modern devs in those ecosystems that use a lot of dependencies see their jobs as plugging together lumps of other people's code. There's a very strong "don't re-invent the wheel" vibe - the first thing any dev does when presented with a problem is look for an existing code base that solves it.

This means that people have their entire jobs on the line relying on other people's code. If the OS library that you found has a bug in it, and your project depends on that library, and your manager is shouting at you to get it fixed, then you're having a bad day. In an ideal world, "fixing the bug" would mean diving deep into the library code, finding and fixing the bug, and submitting a PR to the maintainer. But this can be beyond the dev's abilities, especially when the only kind of coding work they're done is plumbing together dependencies. So they only have two options: try and get the maintainer to fix the bug, or switch dependencies (which might take longer, and possibly have other bugs).

There's a real sense of "I'm using your library, giving you cred, so you need to fix it for my use-case" that I've seen. It doesn't help that dependencies are free (as in beer) - it's a well-known truth that people don't respect things that are free.

I think for all of this to change, we need to scale back the dependence on dependencies, audit dependencies properly for security and sustainability issues, and pay the maintainer. If there's any change needed in Github, it's that Github needs to start charging a fee for every download.

Agreed, I would never write such a message. I have zero responsibility toward the users of my open source code, and my license does reflect that fact, unless they pay me.

You're not satisfied with my open source work? Fork and fix it. You can't fix it? Hire somebody who can. You don't have the money to hire somebody who can? Then find other users, do a fundraiser and hire somebody who can fix the code.

This culture of entitlement has gone way too far. Some companies make billions out of some open source project yet never contribute a cent or a man hour back yet you still find engineers from these companies complaining on github issues that bugs aren't resolved quickly enough.

I say this, this might be the golden age of open source now but it's not going to last. Users have become too petty and entitled.

What bugged me the most was how unwilling users were to dive into code to make small edits. They’d rather spend 3X the time filing issues, writing emails, and tweeting about it. And if you tell them, “maybe you should just not use this,” then you’re seen as unreasonable.

The entitlement drove me out. The market is more about chasing shiny things than using things that are the best fit.

It's a common thing that a person imagines that he's responsible for something, can't keep up with it and finally feels himself failed, despite the fact that he wasn't really responsible in the first place. But it's still a source of misery and disappointment. I guess, it takes some time to understand what's the real responsibilities are and what's the imaginary responsibilities are. I agree that putting some code public with open source license does not bind author to any kind of responsibility and any continued work from him is just a charity to the world which he can stop providing at any time. If someone needs more guarantees, he can pay author or any other person (if code is open source) to provide those guarantees.

Most projects life because of huge support of few people. Pareto principle: 20% doing 80% of the work. And in my opinion on the most projects doing less then 10% more than 90% of the work.

I have an OS project too, people want 1000 things, you can say "ok, make a PR and it will be integrated", many make a good PR, but that's it. Normally they do not make any support, they made feature they need, and they are gone when it is implemented. (not all, but most people)

And when issues come up, because of the new feature, you can try to contact the creator, sometimes they help, sometimes not. But to contact them is work too.

I am so happy that i found a "community manager" (after years and many try it), who does all the non-programming stuff and keep the project alive, cause my time is spare too.

Humility and a strong sense of responsibility.

And perhaps a little bit of false guilt, because they were overwhelmed by the sheer amount of work. Perhaps they didn't estimate how time consuming it is to do this and feel guilty about that.

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