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Comment by Karunamon | Hacker News Reader

>your comments are, bluntly, massively entitled.

Really? I see no entitlement, merely a very common annoyance that FOSS projects are traditionally very bad at support (and your frankly, shitty, attitude is part of that, and part of the reason many enterprises consider community open source projects to be absolute last resort)

If I had a penny for every time I had a question ignored in IRC or mailing list ghost towns, I'd be running my own Y Combinator by this point. Those that will actually take the time to help users out, or projects with sufficient and good enough documentation that the "hand holding" as you put it, isn't necessary, are like refreshing oases in a vast desert.

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I mean, would you be okay with support that cost money?

That seems to be the model that Red Hat went with, for instance.

I would be okay with no support (explicitly mentioned) vs no support where that's not implied to be the case.

    <rant>

There's nothing that sucks quite so bad as a link on a project page which says "Go here for help" - you do so, then find out you are in an IRC channel with 500 people, none of which ever speak, any questions are simply lost in the ether among the hundreds of join/quit messages per hour.

In other words, don't say you provide support if you don't intend on giving it. At least a message along the lines of:

    This is provided as is, where is, if it breaks you get to keep both parts

..forewarns me to either not waste my time, or be prepared to waste quite a bit of time.

As it stands, now I've wasted time, and now I hate your project for being an unsupported piece of shit, and now I hate the developers for fucking lying about it.

This is a literal experience I'm fighting with right now.

    </rant>

And worse, every time a user encounters this situation, it tars all of FOSS with the same brush. It's what leads to people joining companies and remembering their experience and telling people not to use X Y and Z due to that bad experience.

turn off the joins/parts/quits in your irc client(we use irc at work, and its the first thing i suggest to new employees)

It's not that I can't see the message anymore, it's that whoever might be able to help likely won't be able to see it.

You aren't entitled to my time for free. Deal.

This entire exhange is a case study in why enterprise (and heck, even regular end users) don't like FOSS.

Reasonable requests (not demands, requests) for basic things like documentation and functionality are met with snark and hostility.

Thanks for contributing to the problem, I suppose.

said the user unsatisfied with something for nothing and now demanding personal support!

a bargain (for you)

and ps -- just so we're clear, the package I've contributed includes the mandatory per-user function help (each with runnable code examples), plus a 10+ page vignette discussing common usage, implemented inference algorithms, and parameter setting suggestions.

The vast majority of email I get starts with the implicit sentence [I'm a lazy prick who can't be arsed to read any of the docs, runnable code examples, or surrounding discussion. So if you could answer questions from someone who couldn't do the briefest amount of research that would be fabulous.]

Those emails are closely followed in quantity by the emails best summarized as "I'm gonna be super vague here but something didn't work. I neither wish to share the exact invocation of your package nor data, and certainly neither of those without prompting, but something didn't meet my unknown expectations and I want you to fix it now!"

Who demanded anything here? Why open an IRC channel and mailing list for "support" if that's not a thing you intend to provide?

Climb off your high horse and put away the moral outrage, please. I am not your enemy.

Your edit only continues to speak to the bad attitude I mentioned earlier.

I sometimes have success on those IRC channels by asking the regulars what other resource or how-to would they use to solve my problem. This is an easy answer for them to give, and doesn't require them getting personally involved in my problem. A page full of search results might all look relevant to a newbie, but an experienced user's recommendation is more likely to hit the mark.

x0x0 said:

> the package I've contributed includes the mandatory per-user function help (each with runnable code examples), plus a 10+ page vignette discussing common usage, implemented inference algorithms, and parameter setting suggestions

That already puts this package at the 99.7th percentile, I'd guess, in level of documentation among open-source projects. x0x0 does not have a bad attitude. A bit of anger born of frustration, okay, but open source developers with bad attitudes do not write documentation at all.

And to answer your question, the primary purpose of the IRC channel and mailing list is to let the users support one another. Only when a question arises that even expert users don't know does the developer need to step in.

If you're willing to pay for support, an email to that effect would probably be welcome. Otherwise, you're already getting more than you paid for.

I share x0x0's surprise that that's not obvious.

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