> Yes, I understand how amazing it is that this software is truly free and created by volunteers, no, I don't understand how that gives you dictatorial power over 100s of users who don't like the changes you've made.
To be honest I don’t see how you can understand the first bit but not the second. Yes, they can make changes that you don’t like without consulting you.
They can; but they shouldn't expect a life free of complaints.
Commercial software, like most things in life, is responsive to incentives. The people who buy things get the most say in the product.
For open source where the end users aren't buying anything, and the developers are either creating product for their own gratification, or for some more nebulous corporate goal, the incentives are rather indirect. And that makes a big difference. Software, under those conditions, will frankly be worse for the majority of users.
>but they shouldn't expect a life free of complaints.
This seems to be the dominant culture, but it's actually pretty toxic that people feel entitled to whine about software created by people who owe them absolutely nothing.
Constructive feedback is useful, and appropriate if the creator indicates that they want it.
Whining and ranting is a waste of energy. It makes people feel bad and leads to no beneficial change.
I don't think Drew DeVault wrote this because he's received lots of useful constructive feedback.
> This seems to be the dominant culture, but it's actually pretty toxic that people feel entitled to whine about software created by people who owe them absolutely nothing.
I don't think that's quite right. It's certainly bad manners to be rude, but the underlying complaints are one of the better - if not best - means by which the people who make the software can get feedback to ensure they're building the right thing.
Would you invest in a startup whose founders constantly complained about how their potential users whined about their product?
Aside from auxiliary revenue sources like complements and consulting, open source software has value in large proportion to how many people use it. Reputation and goodwill, if nothing else, bragging rights, job opportunities, and so on. You don't get these things from writing software than isn't used.
And you can't really expect everyone to provide constructive feedback. Often, the more emotional the rant, the more pain the user is feeling. Not all humans are dispassionate rational agents. Not every user is a professional product manager able to outline constructive incremental improvements to satisfy requirements. And it's silly to expect that. Product managers are paid well in industry to do this. Doing it for free for open source is just as much a donation.
I'll go further. If you're not willing to tolerate more and more rants as your software gets more popular, to the point that you end up not contributing or quitting, it might be better if you didn't start. Abandoned and decaying software hurts too, and it especially hurts the people who took a bet on it.
(I learned my lesson young. I created a few bits and pieces of open source, and quickly found the the effort of integrating the contributions of third parties more work than it was worth. The only way I'd do open source again is as a developer outreach / organization halo PR strategy for the benefit of a company I'm being well compensated to work for.)
I think we’re talking largely at cross purposes. It might be a good idea for maintainers of open source projects to listen to all feedback. However, nothing obliges them to do so, and you’re not entitled to be angry with them if they don’t.
If someone relies on a piece of open source software on the assumption that it will be maintained in perpetua for free, then they’re simply foolish, and they have only themselves to blame for any resulting harm.
> Not all humans are dispassionate rational agents
You seem to be forgetting that this applies just as much to the people who maintain open source projects. The endless negativity inevitably has an effect.
What makes you think people owe nothing to each other in the open source ecosystem? I maintain a package for Fedora, I have submitted a few patches to the Linux Kernel, and I regularly report bugs. Do the Wayland developers not benefit from any of the above?
Even my mother, who is not very technical, has managed to identify bugs here and there which I report on her behalf. Do the Gnome developers not benefit from that?
We cannot all be contributors to every package we use, but we are all part of an ecosystem and we all have the right to ask for changes by others in that ecosystem. You call it whining, but you know what? When developers break use cases, users have the right to complain about it. If the Wayland developers do not want to hear those complaints, they should not be involved in developing software that millions of people depend on, nor should they have tried to replace software that millions of people depend on.
Giving a project feedback does not impose any obligation on the maintainers of that project to help you – even if they find the feedback useful. In general, it's rude (and ineffective) to try to unilaterally impose non-trivial obligations on people without getting their prior agreement.
Actual contributions are another matter. If you contribute to a project, then sure, you should get a say proportional to the size of your contribution. And I wonder how many of the people who complain about Wayland have made sizeable contributions?
An important point here is that it's up to the maintainers to evaluate the value of your contributions from their point of view. If you don't respect this, you're again trying to impose obligations unilaterally. That is, offering help that may not really have been wanted in the first place and then expecting something in return.
>If the Wayland developers do not want to hear those complaints, they should not be involved in developing software that millions of people depend on, nor should they have tried to replace software that millions of people depend on.
This seems way off base to me. I hope this attitude is not pervasive because it seems like it's a huge discouragement to people who want to write useful software. (If you succeed to any degree, millions of people are automatically entitled to shout at you whenever they experience some inconvenience.)
"I wonder how many of the people who complain about Wayland have made sizeable contributions?"
How many people asked for their distro to switch to Wayland?
You seem to think that these critical packages that millions of people depend on can be treated like hobbyist projects. Yes, when your project is a hobby, you can tell people that their complaints are not your problem and that they should just fork the code if they need something different. However, distros should not make hobbyist projects core components that users are unable to avoid, nor should anyone push their hobbyist project as a replacement for a core component.
The fact is that the Wayland developers set out to replace X11. In what world are they not opening themselves to criticism from people whose use-case was supported by Xorg but not supported by Wayland? By now a decision made by the Wayland maintainers will affect the vast majority of desktop Linux users; why should they be immune from complaints? When people depend on your software you have to deal with their complaints, that is just a fact.
>> To be honest I don’t see how you can understand the first bit but not the second. Yes, they can make changes that you don’t like without consulting you.
People in charge of large FOSS projects like Gnome should not pretend it's just some hobby project they can do whatever they want with. Those projects are essentially public infrastructure and should be treated as such. It's not their personal plaything.
Yes, people who do the work have the most say, but sometimes they really use that to do stupid things with the code. I don't know how to correct that though. Commercial software is no better about this.
>People in charge of large FOSS projects like Gnome should not pretend it's just some hobby project they can do whatever they want with. Those projects are essentially public infrastructure and should be treated as such. It's not their personal plaything.
They're not pretending. I'm afraid you're laboring under a misconception. Nothing obliges the GNOME team to accede to the wishes of people who contribute nothing to the project.
"Nothing obliges the GNOME team to accede to the wishes of people who contribute nothing to the project"
Nothing, until users flee and they stop receiving bug reports, patches, donations, and so forth. Moreover, because of what Gnome is, if they drive users away it will also negatively impact other projects, because for a lot of those users leaving Gnome means ditching open source software entirely and switching to e.g. OS X.
If the users aren't willing to fork, then having them run away to osx (where, by the way, everything is also imposed on you) doesn't seem that great of a loss.
Part of the joy of open source are the freedoms it gives you, including the freedom to fork a project that doesn't meet your needs and make it so that it does. This works as it should pretty often - look at the gnome2 forks, the systemd-less distros etc. There's plenty of choice out there, and plenty of opportunity to get involved.
If you're unwilling to exercise those freedoms, then you're just whining about the stuff you're getting for free.
You are right that with OS X you have no particular say over the features. On the other hand, you do not have to deal with poorly supported hardware, and if something goes wrong there are people whose job is to help you. Most users find those things to be advantages, but many will choose open source software because of the various other freedoms they can get. There are also people who choose open source software because they have unusual requirements that proprietary systems either cannot meet or are too difficult/expensive/onerous to deal with.
Losing users is always a bad thing for the open source ecosystem. Lost users means fewer bug reports, fewer patches, fewer donations, and less support from paid developers working for various corporations (easy to forget but there are people whose job is to maintain open source projects like the Linux kernel). Fewer users means less incentive for hardware companies to provide any support, even just minimal technical documentation, needed for open source developers to write drivers (let alone contribute to that).
Forks require a significant commitment of time and effort, and really should be considered a last resort. The time commitment is much greater for prominent projects that receive a lot of activity like Gnome or Linux. Most users, even those with the necessary technical skills, do not have enough spare time to maintain a fork when things break.
Your dismissive attitude is fine for a obscure hobbyist project with a dozen users. It makes no sense for desktop Linux distros that now have many millions of users.
I understand where this thinking comes from but I still think it's kind of a simplistic attitude. People depend on the technology they use. When you convince someone to rely on something you've produced (and, crucially, continue working on), I think you do actually create a duty to be responsive to them. They depend on your work. Are we really so limited in our ethical thinking that we require an exchange of money to create obligation?
I understand that people can be aggressive, rude, and downright hostile. I'm not suggesting that such behavior be rewarded. Nor am I suggesting that every open source project has to do everything any user says. I do, however, object to the notion that there is no obligation whatsoever between the producer of a technology and the users of that technology, regardless of whether money has changed hands.
You somehow think that someone who’s done you a favor (by providing you with useful software for free) owes you more than someone who’s done nothing for you at all. That’s exactly backwards. You are obliged to them!
I struggle to express how strongly disagree. This is like saying that someone who gives away a 3D printer on freecycle is then obliged to help you fix any problems with it.
If you read the fine print there is, quite literally, no obligation at all. From the MIT license:
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.
You will find that most other FOSS licenses contain a similar clause.
That's a legal disclaimer designed to head off a specific commercial legal liability. If you go looking to use law as a foundation for right and wrong, you're going to be sorely disappointed.
What I quoted isn't a law, this is something that authors have to deliberately put in their licenses/contracts for the specific work in question. If you wish to have other obligations with your open source software that you believe are less wrong, it would be wise to get those in writing.
It's not clear what else it is that you'd want. The MIT license seems to get used because it's short and to the point in stating priorities: Here's the software, do what you want with it, but don't take credit and don't come after us if it doesn't work for your use case or if it causes your CPU to explode. If your issue is with the "legalese," it wouldn't be any less meaningful if you stated it differently.
>> Nothing obliges the GNOME team to accede to the wishes of people who contribute nothing to the project.
I said nothing of the sort. They have an obligation to the project and its value as a piece of infrastructure used by many (including noncontributors).
But by saying that they have an obligation to noncontributors you do seem to be saying something at least in the neighborhood of what I suggested. I can’t understand where you think this obligation comes from. I used GNOME for a while. I never once imagined that the people who worked on it owed me a damn thing.
> People in charge of large FOSS projects like Gnome should not pretend it's just some hobby project they can do whatever they want with. Those projects are essentially public infrastructure and should be treated as such. It's not their personal plaything.
Pretty sure they are aware of this, even Gnome. Gnome's Dev Team is often citing user studies etc. and I believe they are genuine in trying to produce software for the public, rather then themselves.
...Though I believe they don't grog how disruptive changes (any change) can be.
To be honest I don’t see how you can understand the first bit but not the second. Yes, they can make changes that you don’t like without consulting you.