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  • On open source and "complaining to the manager"

  • Dde0u

    • Post #1
    • Edited

    I happened to come across an interesting article by Evan Martin, the author of the Ninja build system, which is one of the tools used when building GrapheneOS: The Success and Failure of Ninja.

    The article includes some material about the author's experience of having written a widely-used piece of open-source software. I have emphasized the part of it that led me to make this post.

    Open source

    [...]

    When I try to take stock of my overall feelings about the project, it is a mixture of the occasional pride when I see someone on proggit or HN say something nice about it and a larger overall sense of disappointment.

    I made this thing that I thought was cool and I gave it away, and what I got back were occasionally friendly people who nicely requested things from me, but more often angry users who demanded things of me, and rarely anyone saying thanks. People repeatedly threatened to fork the project when I didn't agree to their demands, never once considering the possibility that I had more context on the design space than they did.

    A different source of sadness were the friendly and intelligent people who made reasonable-seeming contributions that conflicted with my design goals, where I wanted to repay their effort with a thorough explanation about why I was turning them down, and doing that was itself exhausting.

    I got into programming via free software, and I wrote code with the desire to give back to the people who gave me so much. (If you are reading this post then I predict you are benefiting from one or more one of my free software contributions.) But today I see that free software is not really about sharing between equals anymore; people instead think of themselves as customers and treat authors as if they can go complain to the manager.

    Another way of saying this is that today I am motivated by just trying to impress or live up to the ~ten hackers that I admire, people like apenwarr or agl or bradfitz or graydon, and while it's occasionally cool to meet someone and have the reputation of my software precede me, I think a lot of "succeeding" was mostly just kind of a burden. I think I could have learned about as much with a much smaller fraction of the success.

    That is the side effect of open sourcing your code - for pretty much everyone I guess. Many people think everything on the internet should be free (as in free beer) and demand without end, never realizing that they're in no position to do so. The concept of empathy is mostly lost nowadays, while the number of narcissistic types increases, who think the world revolves around them. And nothing could be further from the truth. Every big project will have an insanely large amount of users who are all by themselves only one of many. It's a mindset problem and I don't think it's going to change anytime soon. At least this post is a good reminder to reflect upon ourselves and our world views.
    I think I am one of the few who doesn't complain much, but rather copes with the limitations set in place by the devs or just silently moves on to a different project if I don't like how something works. It would also be wise for everyone here to rethink if a change they propose is viable (usually you can predict if something is possible by thinking logically) in the first place before making any demands. And I've seen some wild s*** proposed here and on Github already. In summary, people should just learn to accept things as they are and be more mindful of those around them, who more often than not provide them with amazing software at no cost. My 2 cents.

      DeletedUser87 people should just learn to accept things as they are and be more mindful of those around them

      It is also possible to learn and build the things that you would like to exist.