>It seems a bit rude to complain about volunteers for doing something they want to do rather than what you want them to do.
It is, a little, but then again it's par for the course for Open Source projects, which are both volunteer AND seeking to engage a larger community.
It's not like its just some people doing what they like and keeping it to themselves or just offering it as-is. Open Source projects that want to become larger communities and attract more developers AND end users, have to accept external opinion and criticism.
There's many different sorts of open source projects, I've been involved with projects that
- are mainly driven by paid contributors, with some volunteers
- some number of paid contributors with many volunteers
- have only volunteers
And they are open source:
- in order to engage a larger community of end users
- in order to engage a larger community of developers (doing things with people is often more fun, and/or having more people poking at keyboards allows more, say, of an experiment to be accomplished)
- to serve as a portfolio, e.g., for job seeking
- as a political position (some variation of "code should be open")
- out of habit/because there's no reason to not be open source
(Or some combination of the above.)
As far as I know, remacs is driven entirely by volunteers, but I don't know where it fits into the latter category. The original author has written blog post(s) about it, so clearly they want people to know about it, but it isn't obvious to me if they care particularly about people using the result for editing text rather than, say, investigating and showing off the solutions to problems encountered along the way (portfolio) or being able to collaborate on a fun project with people (community of developers).
In any case, I agree with you about projects accepting criticism, but I think the style of criticism needs to take into account the specifics of the project: something like, there should be less "this is a waste of effort"/"I think you should do something else" and more of the pure technical stuff ("algorithm ABC might be more efficient than the XYZ currently used, as ABC is O(n log n)", or something) as one moves further down either list.
It is, a little, but then again it's par for the course for Open Source projects, which are both volunteer AND seeking to engage a larger community.
It's not like its just some people doing what they like and keeping it to themselves or just offering it as-is. Open Source projects that want to become larger communities and attract more developers AND end users, have to accept external opinion and criticism.