If you failed to give them proper reproduction information when asked, then yeah, you were wasting their time and they should rightfully close your issue.
I've never seen anyone on the curl team undeservedly "lambast" someone, and for a project that has a quite good reputation, I think the burden of proof is on you. Can you link to these supposedly terrifying comments?
It is entirely possible I merely chanced upon his highlights, but this announcement to me really just signifies a final straw breaking than anything else. His historical conduct is all public and speaks for itself. I wish I had the patience and perseverance he does, and I wish he didn't need it.
So if you follow what’s been happening, you know the types of reports this message is talking about. What they consider time-wasters are slop reports where the reporter didn’t do any effort to even test the “bug” and then keeps pasting whatever the LLM says in replies and lying about using them.
In other words, for a legitimate report it’s hard to believe that was the reaction. I would expect them to be patient with a human contributor which really put in the work. It’s particularly hard to believe the maintainers would even waste their time to lambast someone on Reddit. Doesn’t seem like their style.
Maybe the person in this thread is exaggerating, maybe they misinterpreted it, or maybe it did happen. But it seems so out-of-character that some proof would be warranted, especially since it’s a single report.
But at the same time, sometimes you have to really persevere to get a bug fixed.
Consider the perspective of the maintainer of a popular project: to them, you're one person in a big queue of people all reporting problems. Most issues turn out to be "I need free technical support, which you don't offer, so I'll phrase it in the form of a bug", and it saps their time to look into the details of each issue to find whether it's genuine-bug or user-error.
So that's why you should try to give reproduction instructions as best you can, and be up-front if they're incomplete, or you only saw it happen once.
If the maintainer responds harshly, or even if you get commentary from others, remember they are (or should be) criticising the bug report, not you. Try not to take it personally.
And even if they decide to close it, or not investigate further, you've still done the world a favour by adding genuine details about something you saw. The bug report is still searchable when closed. Other people who get the same problem as you are likely to find it, and it might spur them to reproducing the bug where you couldn't, and re-opening or re-reporting the bug and driving it forward to completion.
(Now, if you used AI to generate the report, well... that's different. Especially if you didn't disclose it up front.)
I’ve basically watched the AI crap cycle go from “this is a weird report, oh it’s fake” to “all the reports are trash, it’s so hard to find real humans in the flood” through his posts.
I suspect I would’ve stepped down long ago. I feel so bad for the open source maintainers who are just being assaulted with nonsense.
The only official community spaces they maintain are:
- their GitHub projects (Issues, Pull Requests, Discussions)
- their mailing lists
- their HackerOne page
If you were harassed on Reddit that is still shitty of course, but it's not gonna be on the project's dev team:
> Some dev teams do not mess around.
Unless some of the devs have verifiable, pseudo-official presence there at least.
https://daniel.haxx.se/job.html
He does criticise rich companies who don’t do anything to support cURL and demand preferential support, but that’s not the same thing (and does warrant criticism).