Don't be that guy.
Don't be that guy.
When you're talking to an open source dev, just remember that they are literally giving you their time for free, and they are people who don't like to be treated poorly.
Edit: Just to be clear, I don’t mean any ill will toward the guy. He’s frustrated and he’s just taking it out in the wrong venue at the wrong people, but that doesn’t mean he’s a bad person.
Edit 2: The reinstalling he’s talking about is NPM. So just running npm install. It’s because he tried removing the node_modules directory, which is a reasonable thing to do, but it means you need to reinstall the modules with that command.
Me approaching Foss developer with bug: Pardon me, if you could grace this lowly worm with but a moment of your attention; I with me a bug report, and I believe I have found the section of code responsible. This inadequate being lacks the technical expertise to fix it and would be eternally indebted if you would turn your monumental skills upon its trifling problems. It would please me immensely if my paltry efforts were of some assistance.
This user: SOFTWARE NO WORK FUCK YOU!
And yet, this is the issue that gets a response instead of a silent closed offtopic wontfix.
Or even worse:
Thanks. Send a complete log of every software on your system, two videos of the bugs in action, and a detailed analysis of what you've had for breakfast.
It is, until it isn’t. I’ve seen devs delete or abandon their projects because of too mush abuse. Nobody likes being yelled at. (Unless that’s your kink. I won’t judge.)
😆 this is legitimately a work of art
The amount of time i spend downloading random projects fixing the bug thats driving me insane making a pull just to have all my work redone by a maintainer cos im using a language i hardly ever use and have no clue what in the hell im doing so i hacked together some dodgy fix that makes u sick to look at. And i would still rather do that then be the guy complaining.
Actually a huge part of debugging is just figuring out where the problem is, so even if your fix isn’t great, you’ve still done a large portion of the work. I always appreciate pull requests, even if I ultimately don’t accept them. The fact that someone else is thinking about how to improve the project is always helpful.
Yeah I just can't imagine being mean to someone who is literally just doing extra work to maybe be helpful.
you can always fork something if you're unhappy with the maintainer. Nobody is making you use a project.
The self entitlement in open-source these days never fails to astound me.
As a maintainer of open-source projects, I can confirm... It's unforunate lol
Nowhere else do people get so much for free and yet be so entitled. It's rough.
And here I am anxious thinking I might offend the devs so I spend way too much time thinking what I've written is not rude
I've only had beef with a single dev ever. The maintainer of Prometheus, Brian Brazil, or whatever his name is. His attitude is so shitty towards people proposing actually good ideas that would push his product forward.
It depends on if the first guy is complaining about having to reinstall this specific software, or if the software borked his entire system to the point that he has to reinstall his entire OS. Because that happened to me once. But in the first scenario he is being a dick, and in the second one not so much.
In this case, in trying to resolve the issue, he deleted his
node_modulesdirectory. So he’s talking about having to reinstall everything by typingnpm installand waiting for it to finish.Wait till they realize that's literally the solution to a lot of Node related issues. It's in its own folder for a reason.
I disagree, in neither scenario the open source dev owes him anything. You get to use and modify the software for free, but the flip side is you are entitled to nothing.
No. It's provided without warranty nor guarantee that it'll work or even leave your system intact. That's the core of most opensource licenses. Dev owes nobody nothing.
YOU 👏 ARE 👏 NOT 👏 OWED 👏 CUSTOMER 👏 SERVICE 👏 FOR 👏 USING 👏 THIS 👏 SOFTWARE 👏
YOU 👏 ARE 👏 NOT 👏 OWED 👏 A 👏 WARRANTY 👏
Don't like it? Pay for your software :)
Don’t like it? Pay for your software :)
Most people happily will. So the year of the Linux desktop will always be n+1
The nightmare just crawls out to our reality when paid software is less developed on and more buggy than free Open Source software.
That’s because the people making it are doing it for a job rather than for the love of it. (Except me. Surely I don’t do that.)
Did you know that "payed" is a naval term. See Grammarly on Payed for more information
User: "I have to waste my whole life fixing this" Dev: "you are complaining that you have to spend a few minutes"
Savage.
You are wasting my time! I demand a refund, where is open source's manager!?
This is also any and all Firefox support queries in a nutshell.
"OMG THIS BROWSER IS SO SHIT IT ALWAYS BREAKS OR GETS SLOW"... "No I have not changed anything in ˋabout:configˋ, and what I did is definitely not the source of the problem!"... "Yes with a reset config it works fine, I don't know why, your browser is shit!"
And it's always the same people who do "hardening" and "privacy enhancement", having fuck all actual clue what they're doing but thinking they're oh so smart. 😑
I see this in the comments section of Skyrim mods and it pisses me off so much
Worse, I see this with Fediverse platforms like Lemmy. During the initial Reddit influx so many people expected the exact level of polish and user experience as Reddit and there were tons of threads (on Lemmy itself) basically complaining how much Lemmy "sucks" compared to Reddit, despite them coming over to Lemmy because Reddit was being enshitified. Same with Mastodon when the Twitter people were coming over.
I mean to be fair it's still terrible. Better than the early days and in my opinion better than using Reddit which is why I'm here. But basic functionality is just awful. Trying to discover new content outside of your particular instances incredibly tedious. So many large instances won't stop trigger happy Banning practically every other goddamn instance out there which isn't helping. The whole thing that originally made Reddit popular was that it was an easy place to go to find almost any topic of Interest but I now have to hunt through many different instances to potentially find what I'm looking for on top of that the community for any one particular interest could easily be scattered across multiple different instances that don't Federate with each other and if I subscribe to all of them I'm going to likely be subjected to a lot of repeating posts
I fully understand why a lot of people were not on board with that I put up with it because I hate Reddit more than I hate that but a lot of people will not share that opinion
It's every game and the bigger the community the lower the denominator.
Couldn't agree more.
For what it's worth I think Brett Cannon wrote one of the best posts ever on the social contract of open source and how Not To Be That Guy :)
https://snarky.ca/the-social-contract-of-open-source/
Should be required reading IMO for anyone ever on Github :P
just spent a few mins reading it, definitly agree with you, required for any issue reporter
Should be required reading IMO for anyone ever ~on Github :P~
Fixed.
Would it be OK if I will be that guy when ranting about NVIDIA Linux drives? Asking for a friend 😉
Oh yeah fuck NVIDIA. All my homies hate NVIDIA.
All mine hate capitalism. Though, I think we're saying the same thing. ;)
When you have blocked most of the troll instances and have no idea what’s going on in these comments
How do you know that someone is on a blocked instance?
If you look at the number of comments Lemmy says there are, versus the number of comments visible, the difference is how many people from blocked instances there are.
I've seen one post where it said there were 51 comments, but none would appear for me. That's because all of the comments were from instances blocked or defederated by my instance.
Hehe, sometimes I wish that I could be snarky like that. ;) Good for you.
I have been told by numerous people these days that there are no free things in life. I write and contribute to FOSS software, and had that exact discussion.
Apparently, I do it to feel good, and for the prestige, a reward in itself. Also, I probably want to make up for something.
"Doing something for free is no excuse to do it badly."
Some others don't even know what "free" means." And some don't believe it at all, that someone is paying me. Probably thinking about influencers or something. Perhaps they saw an ad somewhere and believed I'd see any of that revenue. ;)
I just went with posting the wiki entry about FOSS, and my ko-fi page, and thanked them for their interest. The first two, because they genuinely didn't know any better, and the third because, well, at least that one is clear. Every user is a tester. Testing is good.
I don’t mean any ill will toward the guy. He’s frustrated and he’s just taking it out in the wrong venue at the wrong people, but that doesn’t mean he’s a bad person.
But he is a bad person. He's being a fucking idiot and being insulting to the person who made the software for him in the first place.
People like that don't deserve patience and understanding. Perhaps a good response would be "this software is free for you to use, if you don't like it then fuck off and make your own".
Everyone without exception has had moments of weakness where they lashed out at something or someone wrongfully. That's a bad deed but that can't be the definition of a bad person.
Especially in this context. The dude isn't really attacking the dev directly. He actually might just be venting. I wouldn't do that like that but you really can't assume anything from such a short exchange.
Exactly. Although you should still not be rude to the Devs if they don't deserve it.
Just reading a mild, reasonable, even keel’d post made my day. I appreciate you!
But he is a bad person.
People like that don't deserve patience and understanding.
These black and white statements won't do you or anyone else any good. We understand that an inconsiderate or rude act doesn't define a person when we can believe that about ourselves and love ourselves despite our many mistakes and cringe-worthy incidents.
When we love ourselves we begin to offer others the same grace and understanding we allow ourselves. We see the myriad reasons we don't think or act how we'd like to and realize that everyone else's life is just as difficult and confusing, and often for reasons we'll never see or understand.
Being polite is better than not being polite, but the way I see it, all user complaints are valid and are better not taken personally if possible. Maybe you as the developer didn't do anything wrong that contributed to their problem, or are not actually in a position to resolve whatever their problem is, but it's worth keeping in mind the bigger picture: how well peoples computers work to benefit their lives.
If someone is getting upset that they have to spend time troubleshooting, maybe because they didn't understand something or made a mistake, there's definitely other people going through the exact same less-than-ideal experience and not saying anything about it. That's information about the state of how well things are working and it's better for it to be out there in some form than not.
Yeah, I didn’t take it personally. He’s just venting, but doing it toward the person trying to help you is unhelpful. That’s why I posted here, basically saying to remember that you’re talking to a person, not a punching bag.
Just wanted to say I'm a big fan of SMUI. I admire and appreciate the work you have done with it.
Thank you. :)
There is always a risk using libraries from others. If you install something without knowing what you are doing and without considering the risks, you should not be installing it.
You are literally sending 99% of the new Linux users back to Windows haha. C' mon its not that hard, look at what custom ROM developers do. They put a big disclaimer warning of the risks of installing the software. You won't find a single user blaming the devs for a bricked phone, and there are lot of them. The one who has to consider the risks and warn about them is the dev, just because (s)he is the one who knows the software better and not all users are developers and they usually don't know what are the risks.
You can install shit in Windows too, it is exactly the same case when grandma installs too many toolbars in Internet Explorer 6. No one is warning you there that you might be installing malware.
What I mean is that there are already curated repositories for each distro that can be accessed easily by the package manager. If you go outside of your package manager and repos, gloves are off, you better know what you are doing.
Regarding custom ROMs, since you brought it up and being a custom ROM enthusiast, there are still a lot of complaints, nastiness and pressure from the users similar to this. Installing a ROM has definitely a higher knowledge barrier and that makes you aware of the risks, also you will brick your phone before you are able to install a ROM... if you don't know what you are doing.
Finally, the developer here in this very lemmy post mentions that the OP of that bug report was working with them in order to solve the issue. The one on the screenshot was just a random dude unnecessarily being rude. Free software is usually delivered as is with no warranties, specifically small projects and libraries.
Thanks for coming to my TED.talk
This goes for inter-developer communication too. Be nice to one another. Someone just wants to help sometimes.
Don't worry: I intend to NEVER be that guy. I don't even USE the word 'literally' except ironically, so I think I'm safe.
I've literally never used the word "literally" unironically in my life
this sort of stuff is rampant. A few years old but it makes my blood boil every time I think about it.
Tool Creator should work on this, it ain't making no sense that the default json file (Google) is not updated cause seeing that work on Google tells us that it definitely works on all sites
@drk1wi please resolve google.json file to stop this cookie disabled error
Seems minor but the tone of the demand is wildly entitled.
Or don't be that "don't use any of my GPLv3 packages in your projects, because i don't want"
Or, that guy who is "My project is free and open source, please don't use for piracy, i don't support piracy"
But yeah, complaining sucks, especially from somebody who doesn't have his hands dirty, to somebody who does
And for free projects, don't pay- don't expect anything And even when paying, don't expect much Just make stuff yourself, only making everything yourself you can be sure it will be good
Open source developers: Why aren't more people using open source software software for everything. It's better.
Also open source developers: Oh it broke your computer, well that's your problem. You should have had a software engineering degree in order to vet the software yourself.
User goes back to closed source paid spyware.. ahem software.
Open source developers: Why aren't more people using open source software software for everything. It's better.
There's a difference between trying to find out what is wrong and being a cunt.
If this person had asked politely after quickly searching for answers, the developer's response would most likely be different and helpful
Absolutely. Should have clarifying that I'm not defending the attitude and abuse of developers. However driving non technical end users to insanity with ill thought through processes is also wrong. Such as expecting users to write bug reports when an automated tool should be being used. An unclear installation guide where 90% of user run into the same problem. etc.
Linus's (LTT) Linux challenge was the ultimate test of the open source community and they failed miserably. Blaming linus for bricking the system. Um hello, he never should have been incentivized to open the command line at all.
It didn’t break his computer. In trying to fix it, he deleted his
node_modulesdirectory, and now he’s complaining that he has to runnpm installand wait for it to finish.So to be clear, it was his own action that caused him to have to reinstall everything.
The entitlement of the open source community can be astonishingly deaf. You tell users that open source is better, users try it and your response is, oh it's free software, you get what you pay for.
Pay who? If I donate do I get paid support? Almost any other paid product/service based off that project almost certainly won't be open source and probably subscription spyware. So your answer to use open source is don't use open source???
If this is your attitude on your repo then don't imply/demonstrate it as for production ready use. It a personal fun dev project not fit for mainstream use. Pick a side, you can't have both.
I actually offer consulting services for this library in particular, so yes, if you pay, you get paid support.
Don’t be that second guy, use Nix.
I agree with OP, but the whole confrontation could’ve been avoided in the first place if all dependencies were spelled out to the letter in the form of a flake.nix with the latest accompanying flake.lock file.
I swear Nix users are the mormons of the Linux world.
It’s a frontend JavaScript UI library. I can’t control what other dependencies people install alongside my library, or even whether they follow my library’s dependency list.
Don't be the guy who ignores reports that your software doesn't work with new dependency versions just because you can't be arsed to test with anything else even if the report looks like a legitimate problem.