I'm the creator and maintainer of a number of popular open source tools and projects. I even went on to start and build a company around many of them. Prior to that though, I was purely just an OSS maintainer during my free time for 3 or 4 years.
This blog post rings true 100%.
The unfortunate thing is that 99.9% of the community is filled with great, helpful, happy people. But then the 1 in 1000 person comes along that is... less than great... and that person puts a raincloud on your day as a maintainer (or even worse: puts a raincloud on SOMEONE ELSE in the community). And this person usually manifests themself exactly as this blog post states: demanding, lacking detail in requests, not understanding, irrational, rude, etc. They're hard folks to deal with.
I try to remember that THEY are also human. One thing I was taught when I worked at Apple Retail (yes, retail) is that people are angry for a reason. Very very very few people are angry purely to hurt you. Almost everyone who is angry, on the flip side, is angry for a reason and emotions are effecting them. I try to empathize and understand their pain, try to see what I can do to help them. This is certainly a challenge, though. ( See my blog post: http://mitchellh.com/apple-the-key-to-my-success )
Disclaimer for the above paragraph: I'm not saying the blog poster here shouldn't take a month off. They absolutely should if they feel that would help. The constant berating is very mentally straining.
Something that helps greatly: if you're a happy user, if you had a good experience, just open an issue that says "Thanks". Some people close it, some people leave it open. Either way I promise that that little gesture of good will will really help the morale of maintainers. We don't even mind closing your non-issue issue. :)
As a maintainer looking at an issue list, we see just that: a list of issues. Its easy to fall into a trap of thinking everything is terrible and everyone hates what you do. Seeing happy users on Twitter, at conferences, etc. reinforces that its not all pain and despair.
So from a maintainer: thank you to the community for being so great! :)
There is a nice canonical document called "How To Ask Questions The Smart Way" that you can point people to, who ask questions in technical communities and need to be educated on how to do so properly: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
Is there a canonical document for "How To Engage With Open Source The Smart Way"? Seems like it'd be useful to have a document like that explains these issues, that you can simply refer people to, without having to explain them every time in a one-off way.
> But then the 1 in 1000 person comes along that is... less than great... and that person puts a raincloud on your day as a maintainer (or even worse: puts a raincloud on SOMEONE ELSE in the community)
I find this to be so true. Both as a condo board members and someone who volunteers time for an open studio event.
(everyone is great in the building but there are those 2 new
complainers/threateners ...and they have had a chilling effect on everything). The feeling in the building changes because of those 2. Try not to let that happen.
The thing I have trouble reconciling is a few of you saying 90+% percent of OSS community is great/friendly but the OSS survey in article showing most projects get virtually no help even if downloaded a lot or with lots of requests. It would seem most FOSS users were selfish freeloaders who talked nicely on forums. Your project might attract different types of users, though.
I write OSS, and also use a lot of it without helping it.
That's the idea.
OSS can work just fine if we put together N developers, each working alone on exactly one of N projects, while using the other N-1 without helping them. The developer is helping the N-1 by working on his/her project which they all use.
I like that. I just dont think most FOSS users are doing that. We could start with number of Apache or Linux users vs number who are FOSS contributors. My model says the disparity would be multiples or exponentially different.
Testing is objectively valuable so long as they send good bug reports. I havent seen a metric on amount of gripes vs actionable reports. That would be interesting data point.
This blog post rings true 100%.
The unfortunate thing is that 99.9% of the community is filled with great, helpful, happy people. But then the 1 in 1000 person comes along that is... less than great... and that person puts a raincloud on your day as a maintainer (or even worse: puts a raincloud on SOMEONE ELSE in the community). And this person usually manifests themself exactly as this blog post states: demanding, lacking detail in requests, not understanding, irrational, rude, etc. They're hard folks to deal with.
I try to remember that THEY are also human. One thing I was taught when I worked at Apple Retail (yes, retail) is that people are angry for a reason. Very very very few people are angry purely to hurt you. Almost everyone who is angry, on the flip side, is angry for a reason and emotions are effecting them. I try to empathize and understand their pain, try to see what I can do to help them. This is certainly a challenge, though. ( See my blog post: http://mitchellh.com/apple-the-key-to-my-success )
Disclaimer for the above paragraph: I'm not saying the blog poster here shouldn't take a month off. They absolutely should if they feel that would help. The constant berating is very mentally straining.
Something that helps greatly: if you're a happy user, if you had a good experience, just open an issue that says "Thanks". Some people close it, some people leave it open. Either way I promise that that little gesture of good will will really help the morale of maintainers. We don't even mind closing your non-issue issue. :)
As a maintainer looking at an issue list, we see just that: a list of issues. Its easy to fall into a trap of thinking everything is terrible and everyone hates what you do. Seeing happy users on Twitter, at conferences, etc. reinforces that its not all pain and despair.
So from a maintainer: thank you to the community for being so great! :)