Open source attracts some of the very worst users. Often people pretending to be trying to help by "suggesting improvements", but just as often entitled people who want to work for free. I don't think policies will change that. It's just something you have to accept when you provide something useful to lots of people for free. Even if you use moderated environments for user feedback (adding the burden of constantly banning people), people will find your email address and complain to you directly. See also: jwz/xscreensaver/Debian drama. Seeing how people treat open source developers makes me hesitant to upload any code I write to a public repository.
I'd expect the worst part for an Asahi project contributor to be the active sabotage some angry Linux kernel devs are trying to pull because they don't like Rust. Users being unreasonable is one thing, but your fellow maintainers are supposed to be allies at least.
I hope Marcan can find a new project to take on that doesn't involve all of this mess.
> Open source attracts some of the very worst users
I don't think it's even just that, it seems to be something about the price.
I work on a piece of closed-source free software, and we consistently get support requests from unbelievably entitled assholes. The worst of them are the ones that have some technical knowledge; they will not only demand things be fixed or implemented, they make completely erroneous statements about how easy it would be to fix/implement with the conviction that they are 100% correct, with a level of arrogance that is impossible to fathom how they could have written their email with a straight face.
The support requests we receive for a paid offering from the same company are 99% of time much more pleasant people (of course there are the, "I PAID FOR THIS YOU MUST FIX IT!!!1!" on occasions, but they're a definite minority).
I think I've said this before, but 'free' seems to attract the worst of humanity.
When I want to give something away, I list it for some nominal fee like $10, then just tell them to keep it. Because when I used to list things for free, I got the dredges of society bothering me. Asking for delivery, asking me to hold it for 3 months til they can find a truck, cussing at me for saying no to both of these, cussing me because I sold it to someone else already, telling me long sob stories to guilt me. I've never had any of that happen when asking for money(except one guy wanted me to deliver it for $20, which was a fair-ish offer).
I wonder if that same 'pay but you'll get it back under the table' model could work for software? At least until the word got out, I guess.
> I hope Marcan can find a new project to take on that doesn't involve all of this mess.
The only way to do that is to never collaborate with anyone else. I hope he'll be someday able to process what happened, why and reach appropriate conclusions. Software development is a social activity, especially with relatively high-visibility projects like Asahi, and it comes with just as usual burden of social troubles as any other kind of social activity.
> Software development is a social activity, especially with relatively high-visibility projects like Asahi, and it comes with just as usual burden of social troubles as any other kind of social activity.
Yes.
> The only way to do that is to never collaborate with anyone else.
Not necessarily. You can also treat project politics and social skills like any other technical skills that you need on your team like network engineering or database optimization.
If you can find trusted collaborators with those social and political skills, you can make a lot of things happen without necessarily being very good at it yourself.
Team building has a lot of parallels with building a full stack technology. Or building a sports team.
It's true, but what I was responding to was "a project to take on that doesn't involve all of this mess".
The real answer is to either learn these skills or, as you suggest, delegate them. Hoping to find something that doesn't involve "all this mess" at all will be fruitless.
That's what I get with my software projects. People tell me that it sucks and I suck at code and other projects have it better, and don't forget to waste months of your time rewriting to Rust, and don't you dare to use unsafe all over your code (see: actix drama)... sigh. But when asked to show their alternative they get silent. So as long as you keep being assertive this is fine. For everyone who comes and behaves like a drama queen you have to prove again and again that talk is cheap and code is how you get the job done. Or you simply ignore them.
In the early aughts, I spent a lot of time writing and maintaining Open Source software. I burned out on that because of rude users. I had one guy track me down offline and phone me at all hours to demand that I drop everything and fix a bug for him. When I pointed out that my day job came first because I have to pay bills, he went on an online screed accusing me of holding him hostage unless he paid for fixes and listing my cell number so people could "encourage me to be a better developer."
In those days, I was part of a core development team for a project with a fairly large community. A few bad users and a few bad development team members is all it takes to poison something like that.
Now I barely even contribute to Open Source projects even when I fix them for my own uses.
Depends on the project. I have found Pinephone users quite nice overall as a kernel developer.
Anyway, if your project involves convincing hundreds of maintainers to increase their cognitive/work load in order to include your fancy new foreign workflow breaking language into their project, you have to expect pushback.
> Open source attracts some of the very worst users.
This has not been my experience. Perhaps consider that the problem is not the users.
> the active sabotage some angry Linux kernel devs are trying to pull because they don't like Rust
On the other hand, users that demand you rewrite the project in their favorite language or otherwise accomodate their preferences over your own are pretty annoying.
> On the other hand, users that demand you rewrite the project in their favorite language or otherwise accomodate their preferences over your own are pretty annoying.
I'd expect the worst part for an Asahi project contributor to be the active sabotage some angry Linux kernel devs are trying to pull because they don't like Rust. Users being unreasonable is one thing, but your fellow maintainers are supposed to be allies at least.
I hope Marcan can find a new project to take on that doesn't involve all of this mess.