this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2024
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Don't be that guy. (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
32 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (3 children)

And yet, this is the issue that gets a response instead of a silent closed offtopic wontfix.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Even if that was true effectiveness is never acceptable justification for cruelty

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Never is a strong word when a collection of people all came together and agreed that Windows 10 should force updates.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The self entitlement in open-source these days never fails to astound me.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

As a maintainer of open-source projects, I can confirm... It's unforunate lol

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Nowhere else do people get so much for free and yet be so entitled. It's rough.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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".

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

In this case, in trying to resolve the issue, he deleted his node_modules directory. So he’s talking about having to reinstall everything by typing npm install and waiting for it to finish.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

oh man..

People can be such dicks, you have my sympathy.

I’ve been thinking about open sourcing a Node project of mine recently.. concerning that this is the kind of thing to expect

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Well, this isn’t usual. This is actually really rare. Almost all of the interactions I have with users of my libraries are great. People are generally appreciative and kind, or at least not rude. This is an outlier, and I try not to let these things sour my experience.

He’s frustrated and he’s being abrasive because of that, but that doesn’t make him a bad person. I try to respond without being rude back, but just stern. Usually when you do that, people will either not respond again or apologize. I’ve never had a user keep being rude, and if I did, I would just ban them.

Sometimes people just kinda forget that on the internet they’re still talking to other real people, you know?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

You're taking a far calmer approach than i could ever take.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You're lucky. I left FOSS dev because I got tired of my free time being abused by people like the one in your post

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

I've had to adopt a two strikes policy towards these aggressive trolls, who treat you like your their personal servant, especially since they make up like <1% of ppl on issue trackers. After a warning, if they don't play nice, then they're out.

It's the only way to keep the coding experience enjoyable, and not suffer from burnout.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Malware is free too

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Malware is not usually open source.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

You are entitled to the truth. If the dev knows their software could have very damaging effects then that should be front and center on the software page.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago

Usually it is? But ultimately it's still your own responsibility. You did not pay the dev, the dev does not ask you to pay them, ergo the dev owes you diddly squad.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You're not entitled to a working computer once you execute a free program?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Honestly, no. It's your job to vet the software you run. If it's open source, you had every chance to make sure it wasn't going to irreversibly break your system ahead of time.

Alternatively, you could pay money for a solution from a reputable company with support.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You're implying that to even install the simplest of programs, I'd need to read and understannd many thousands of lines of code, starting with the FOSS project itself and then spidering out to every dependency. This speaks nothing of the fact that it may be written in multiple languages, some of which I am not familiar with, and even if I am, code can be written in ways that's almost impossible to understand. This might take a week for a 200 line project.

Reminds me of when my employer said they were going to stop using open source software until a team had vetted it completely. Lol, once they talked to engineers that idea died immediately.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

This. I swear, some people in the FOSS community seem to be convinced everyone who uses a computer is a developer.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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. 😑

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago

YOU 👏 ARE 👏 NOT 👏 OWED 👏 CUSTOMER 👏 SERVICE 👏 FOR 👏 USING 👏 THIS 👏 SOFTWARE 👏

YOU 👏 ARE 👏 NOT 👏 OWED 👏 A 👏 WARRANTY 👏

Don't like it? Pay for your software :)