Stop Wasting My Time
github.com
github.com
I actually just came back to delete this post because I think it's going to spread rage instead of opening a conversation but too late to delete now.
I've been wondering about the authors and maintainers of open source software and how much hate they get while sharing the fruits of their labor with the rest of the world for free. I wonder if it's better to bend to the whims of every user or like this author tell people to get lost and stop wasting time, or perhaps somewhere in between.
I think the author seems like an excellent programmer who has dedicated a huge part of his life to open source. I'm not sure if it's a great idea to tell your users to basically go away if they don't like the way you do thing but perhaps you need to be that direct in order to save yourself from distractions and be able to focus on actually creating your product. I wonder how important PR is for a free and open source project.
Update checks and auto-updates for OSS are often an anti-feature though, not for the "surveillance" argument which is silly, but because update checks are often performed by distributions using the package, and it's often double work on the distributor part to change the default, something it's easily missed while packaging.
Expecting that your software does unexpected network requests where it shouldn't is also something I agree with, even if those are benign. Many people seem to think that software is going overboard with this, as stuff like little-snitch wouldn't be popular otherwise and thrust has been _already_ been eroded completely on commercial software.