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Comment by dnzkw | Hacker News Reader

God forbid you disturb the automatic tests of a company who's using your software without giving you anything in return.

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How do you know they aren't giving anything in return?

You'd know if they were. Thus if you don't, they aren't.

If they're paying for support or using RHEL (which employs many linux maintainers and contributors), how would I know?

Sounds like you wouldn't find out about their issue via a stackoverflow question then, but rather via the support channel they're paying for.

Especially for non-priority issues, community resources are often more effective than paid "support channels".

You're kinda answering your own question here aren't you?

No. Paying for/supporting open projects makes sense for lots of reasons, just "I get to submit tiny questions" isn't usually one of them.

You know the contributions of every Stack Overflow commenter and their employer? impressive, how do you do that?

Okay, riddle me this: I work in a restaurant. I hand a bill to my customers. They leave without paying.

But actually, how do I know they haven't paid? Maybe they gave the restaurant money ahead of time when I wasn't around, or they paid secretly behind my back...

Or they just haven't paid their bill and i don't need to dig into it further. i ask them. If they paid, they'll let me know.

If they have, I'll know. If I don't know, they likely haven't. If they have anyway, they'll tell me.

When I go ask questions on Stack Overflow I don't usually go "btw I work for XYZ, we are maintainers of A/B/C and contribute to D/E/F/G/H", no, because it's not relevant. Even though the maintainers of Linux tools very likely use at least one of A-H.

You're completely missing the point of my post(s).

If you're contributing back to the software somehow, you'll have a more direct line to the developers. I've worked around, with and in open source nearly two decades, I've never seen this not be the case for anyone whose contributions weren't insignificant.

If your issue is anything but trivial, you'll be going through channels where it is in fact obvious you have contributed back. Not stack overflow. For this issue it absolutely applies.

If you can prove to me that the original poster/company has significantly contributed to the utility in question, I'll buy you a pizza. Your choice of toppings.

Okay, for the specific tool, sure. I tend to view this more as an ecosystem thing, and wouldn't consider someone who contributes elsewhere as someone scorn-worthy "not giving back" even if they haven't touched my specific small piece of software before. We started with

> God forbid you disturb the automatic tests of a company who's using your software without giving you anything in return.

By that measure the reaction to KDE CI asking about this man bug would be the same: "fuck them, what did they ever do for us". Fair?

This of course would be different for the (all-to-common) example of someone barging in and making threats/demands, but that's not the case here. Someone asked a question, nothing more.

I get what you mean and i agree to some extent. With that said i think the general disdain is justified given that the absolute majority of people and companies do not in fact contribute back.

Those who do shouldn't feel targeted by such statements imo.

Yes, I'm also very much talking about this specific case, where someone posted a factual question to a community channel. No demands, no "how dare you", no shouting, not even directly poking a maintainer. And I find the reactions jarring that just because they mentioned "our CI" suddenly they have to be bad guys. (Hoping that an end-user asking "my script unexpectedly failed" would not also get "what did users ever do for us" response)

What does the automatic test EVEN DO?

FOSS software wants to be taken seriously, until they have to deal with the real world, then it's all "hey man, what do you expect for free?".

I don't think software is capable of wanting anything. As a FOSS user the less "seriousness" the better. Life is just more fun with jokes. I love that I can build "sudo" with an option to have it insult me when I get my password wrong. Who wants to live a serious life?

Plenty of commercial software contain easter eggs as well.

I worked for a company where a developer put a dirty limerick in a UI control, activated by a keystone sequence.

They also turned on output tracing via another keystroke sequence.

During a presentation, one of the consultants needed to turn on tracing in front of a VERY large multinational client (heavens knows why, it was in front of C-suite execs…). They hit the wrong keystroke, and up popped the limerick - on a large projector, in front of the CEO.

Don’t put in Easter eggs.

I'm not saying putting easter eggs in is a good practice, only that it's not rare. I think with pretty much every company I've worked for, putting in easter eggs was specifically forbidden. And, in every company, they were put in anyway -- they just had to be sneaky enough to pass through code review undetected (which, I think, improved the quality of them!)

The lesson I take from that story is you should avoid dirty easter eggs, but innocent silly ones still seem fine to me.

What does this even mean?

It's a criticism of the way FOSS software advocates seem to want to eat their cake and have it too. They ask the world why they aren't using more FOSS software, which has all these benefits from being free and open, and when the world replies with a list of all the downsides of relying on software written by people hacking in their spare time --see: JWZ and the CADT model-- the advocates fall back on the defense that you can't complain because it is free.

I know it sounds ridiculous, because free software is written by a diverse group of people with diverse goals, but this conversation happens all the time because its advocates often try to represent it as a cohesive whole, that it very much isn't, in pursuit of their own agenda.

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