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Comment by mikl | Hacker News Reader

That’s the nice thing about Open Source. Nothing’s stopping you from organizing this yourself.

This is the standard voice of someone who's never had to deal with a badly maintained or managed open source product or an asshole maintainer or had to run a fork for 6 years because no one will merge a trivial fix in. Or had a LibreOffice bug open for a decade.

Yeah I can really get in there and spend 2 years ripping the horrible UI out, then have to run a fork because it's not of interest to the maintainers and will never be merged.

At that point I'll just use MS office. Costs me 10 minutes salary a month.

But you can't fix that one either.

I haven't found anything that needs fixing.

Man, I hate how excel behave a lot of times but I thank God everyday that it exists.

On the backend while writing macros you discover a lot of...interesting choices

Like how sometimes my macros failed because it does not interface with the regional formatting of the system (had to take 0.34 and convert it to 0,34 by converting it to string). The reverse is not necessary.

How value and value2 exists as property of a cell (I will bet whatever you want that it was a temporary name) and how the "value" behavior is dogshit.

How stuff is hyper advanced but stuff that SHOULD work does not....

It's an interesting look at it.

I don't understand these stories: Do people talk to the maintainer before they work on the change? If not, why not? It seems necessary and obvious to get people on board before you invest in something.

If you can get a discussion going with the maintainer, which is not a guarantee (cant speak to libre maintainers, but I know other projects like this), then you have to convince them that your change is both valuable and reasonable for them to maintain. The latter part there is key - they are _maintain_ers. You write the code once and then run off. If you write some new UI in some fancy framework then they have to live with it forever and learn a new framework to support it. Its a big cost for them, so on smaller projects maintainers can get defensive/grumpy

As such a maintainer: you hit the nail on the head.

Add to that an infinite stream of bug reports and feature requests, and it gets tiring. I don't even have the time to answer all bug reports...

Yes. Lucky if you even get noticed.

I talked once to the OpenOffice maintainers (there was no LibreOffice yet) - they were really open for contributions.

But I still did not contribute, because their understanding of a good UI was not what I had in mind.

They are office people.

(At least at that time, but I don't think that changed)

And I was used to how graphical design software worked. I would have had to fork and that was out of my scope.

Not everyone has an extra 20 hours a week to contribute to open source, and I'm assuming a project as big as LibreOffice has a lot of non-technical hurdles in place for anyone new. It's perfectly reasonable to donate to people already working on it tho.

He didn't want to do work himself, he wanted to contribute monetarily and have the desired outcome provided to him. That's the not-nice thing about Open Source.

The comment said 'organizing this', not doing the development work. That could mean crowdfunding to fund development of the desired outcome.

A faff, of course, but perhaps a better deal than contributing monetarily to Microsoft to have Copilot shoved in your face instead of the features you actually want.

organizing is by far more difficult work than coding.

You can crowdfund for a project manager!

Laughs in Wayland.

Sometimes no amount or organising or doing the work yourself can move things forward appreciably.

Opportunity cost can’t be ignored, and that is absolutely a huge cost.

The converse of this is the bad thing about open source. Although seemingly nothing's stopping people sometimes, somehow stuff still tend not to get done.

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