Comment by wildmanx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wildmanx | Hacker News Reader

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For you and everybody else complaining about this aspect: This is open source software. GPL licensed. It's provided as-is. You are free to use it and express what you think about it, and the maintainers are equally free to do with your opinion whatever they like, which includes ignoring it.

Clearly, none of the maintainers found this to be a problem. They likely don't need proxy settings for themselves. And they apparently also don't want to spend the time and energy to fix an issue that they don't have. That doesn't mean it's not an issue. It's just not an issue for them and they choose to do other things in life than fix it for you. Do you really demand somebody who already gave something to you for free to do even more work for free to implement something that they don't need themselves? Why would they do it? To get you to stop complain?

It's open source, you are free to go fix it yourself. This is Hacker News, lots of people on here should have the competence to fix this. Yet, in the last 10 years, apparently nobody found it so bad that they fixed it. It is clearly not impacting as many people as you make it sound like.

"Nobody should use Deluge" is an unsuitable statement, just because it has an issue in your use case. Many people don't have that use case, and of those who do, nobody bothered to fix it yet. Complaining doesn't fix anything.

What needs just as much fixing as the raised issue is your attitude towards open source.

I hate this philosophy of yours with all my might.

When you put something out there, you should strive to do right by your users. It is fine if you do not have time to fix a particular bug, but communication and asking for help should then be your priorities as maintainer. If 10 years of mostly silence on your part have passed, IMHO you have failed to be an effective open source maintainer.

I understand that open source doesn't offer you any rights or guarantees, but it does not have to be written in a contract to care about your software and its particular shortcomings.

Lastly, if you say a maintainer can do whatever they want with their software, I say that users should be free to be critical of it. There is no attitude in OP, they pointed out that a possibly major security bug still exists and people should be very careful about using it. Being open source doesn't mean nobody should dare criticise you.

Or, it's been 10 years because no-one has submitted a reproducible test-case.

At least, I don't see any in that bug report.

> When you put something out there, you should strive to do right by your users.

We clearly disagree here.

I also like when some open source author is responsive after they put something out there. And I myself try to be helpful as well. After all, one of the reasons for me publishing things as open source is to attract a community that directly (through patches) or indirectly (through issue reports) helps me to improve the thing I made. Win-win!

But demanding this is actually actively hurtful to the ecosystem. To put it bluntly, would you prefer that somebody just doesn't publish some nice piece of software they wrote to scratch some itch they had just because they have no time/energy/desire to then provide support for users? I don't. I want them to publish it anyway. Maybe somebody else can pick up the maintenance. Or not, but at least it's out there.

> I hate this philosophy of yours with all my might.

"Hate" is a strong word. This is pretty sad.

(apologies, this might be a bit snarky)

i hate this philosophy of yours with all my might. (ok, not really, but i do dislike it)

when i put something out there, i do it to share what i build for myself and for my own needs. i may be asking for help in general, but i won't ask for help for every specific issue unless that issue is a priority for my self and i can't fix it. time is to short to worry about every single low priority problem.

and how dare you judge someone elses effectiveness as a maintainer!

that, my friend, is quite an insult. you have no idea how effective they are. you don't live their life. you don't know what other responsibilities they have. what's next? asking that they commit a minimum number of hours each week for the project? demanding that they respond to any request within a day?

users should be free to be critical of it

absolutely not. you can say: "unfortunately, i have this problem, so i can't use this, i am going to go use something else". but that's about it.

criticism is the bane of our society. criticism hurts peoples feelings. criticism causes burnout. FOSS maintainers are volunteers and absolutely do not deserve that kind of criticism for just developing software. (that doesn't make them above any criticism. if they are rude or mean to their users, then that may well be criticized. but not if they ignore a problem or are unresponsive. they may well have other things in their life that are more important than to care about your software issue) (and if the developer is paid, direct any criticism at the company, but don't beat up the employee who may not have the freedom to choose what issues to work on)

Being open source doesn't mean nobody should dare criticise you

if you didn't pay for it, it means exactly that.

I agree that using “nobody” is not fair, and I’ve edited it. Note that in my opinion, the developers don’t need to do anything.

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