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I've never understood it. I've only had horrific experiences with my open source efforts. From the simplest cases like being ignored on PRs and tickets to mocke

• craftyguy 8y ago
  Funny, I've had the exact opposite experience. Maybe you were just trying to associate with poorly-led projects? Edit: Not all open source projects have shitty leaders, but some do, and it's not always obvious which ones those are until you've invested some non-zero amount of time/effort into it.
  • KirinDave 8y ago
    Perhaps, I should not be surprised the first response here is, "Well maybe that's your fault for not having a crystal ball which can predict the actions of strangers." That attitude is part of the problem. Similarly, "My experience was fine, so clearly your bad experience needs to be invalidated" is a toxic attitude.
    • craftyguy 8y ago
      Well, there are literally millions of people who don't share your same experience, so rather than claim that everyone is wrong and open source development doesn't work, maybe you are doing something wrong. Just a suggestion, because it totally does work for many people. Maybe you just have to find the right group of people to work with. There are a few shitty projects, but you'll find bad apples in many areas of life.
      • KirinDave 8y ago
        > so rather than claim that everyone is wrong I didn't. This is your inability to tolerate a different viewpoint. I didn't say you had a bad experience, just that I can't relate to the good ones. I qualified every statement with _I_, _my experience_, and _feel_ and you're still willing to stand up and argue with me about it. And that is, in fact, a toxic attitude. You're arguing that I'm neither allowed to have nor relate negative experiences. Stop doing that. Stop doing what you're doing right now. It serves no purpose other than to further embed this toxic attitude into a community you obviously love and want to represent positively.
        • craftyguy 8y ago
          Stop interpretting everything as a personal attack. It makes it seem like you were the bad apple, by immediately conflating contradictory statements and experiences into personal attacks. I would not want to work with such a person, in an open source project or otherwise. I merely suggested that your bad experiences might have been because of the projects you worked with, so a general statement of "open source bad" might be a bit extreme because many others have had positive experiences. I'm sorry you had a shitty experience working on open source projects. That sucks for everyone. Not all open source projects have shitty leaders, but some do, and it's not always obvious which ones those are until you've invested some non-zero amount of time/effort into it.
          • KirinDave 8y ago
            > Not all open source projects have shitty leaders, but some do, and it's not always obvious which ones those are until you've invested some non-zero amount of time/effort into it. If this was your intent, then I apologize for misreading it. But being very clear: this is not how the original text of your post read.
      • ppseafield 8y ago
        Now he's contributed his impression and every comment is browbeating him or criticising him. Sounds like he got very unlucky. Wouldn't it be worth it to discuss how that could be mitigated? Also, people always forget the rest of that phrase: A bad apple spoils the bunch. Pretty important nuance!
    • tonto 8y ago
      Your original comment is pretty toxic. What do you want to imply by your original anecdotal comment other than grandstanding? This is a research article, and you could suggest that the researchers look at more negative aspects of open source that could affect developers but to say basically open source is terrible is ridiculous
      • KirinDave 8y ago
        How is relating my experiences adjacent to the subject of the article, as someone who has in fact released two rather large open source projects (one with a fair amount of ongoing traction) toxic? Just because it documented experiences that were negative? The responses so far: - It's your fault for doing it (true, but unhelpful). - Maybe you should care (I released the original work, I cared enough) - Even talking about adjacent experiences is inappropriate and and you should stop. (yours)
      • nickpsecurity 8y ago
        If they're doing research, they'd need the negative reports for accuracy. KirinDave would be one data point among others in that. We know they exist since Nadia Eghbal did collect that information: https://medium.com/@nayafia/how-i-stumbled-upon-the-internet-s-biggest-blind-spot-b9aa23618c58 https://medium.com/@nayafia/how-i-stumbled-upon-the-internet... If anything, people should see the big picture of the range of experiences they might have so they're not being misled into getting into something that's a gamble. It might be good for them, it might be really bad, and it might be something in between. FOSS promoters don't usually sell it that way, though.
• andreyv 8y ago
  This feels like you were forcing yourself to contribute for whatever reason. The best results are when you are genuinely interested in your work and in the process of making software better.
  • KirinDave 8y ago
    Some of the projects were in fact my original work. I was genuinely interested. I get similar negative feedback for writing, often. I don't write issue reports on github because I'm tired of people being angry at me for reporting problems or being derisive because I don't have the workarounds they didn't write down.
    • khc 8y ago
      Could you provide some links so we can all see exactly what behaviors to avoid?
      • scarejunba 8y ago
        The OpenSSL business. Everyone and their uncle were suddenly expert programmers who would never have written a bug into code. People sucked so bad at reading code, sucked so bad at writing an SSL library, and sucked so bad at auditing the code they depended on. And yet the OpenSSL guys were supposedly incompetent.
    • _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
      This sort of thing varies wildly from project-to-project. I've had a range of experiences from the type you describe to developers bending over backwards without prompting.
• SiempreViernes 8y ago
  How are you experiences of other volunteer work?
  • KirinDave 8y ago
    I've done volunteer teaching and some volunteer civil work and those were fun, mostly. Especially the teaching part. Is your thought, "Perhaps this person just doesn't enjoy volunteer work?"
• jancsika 8y ago
  > From the simplest cases like being ignored on PRs and tickets [...] Yes, that's unfortunately a big problem in FLOSS. It will take a big effort to change that. But I think there are some communities who take mentorship seriously that are incrementally improving this. > to mockery in social circles for algorithmic mistakes [...] That's 100% unacceptable. Did this happen on a public mailing list? If so, can you post a link? > to finding out my work was enabling bad people [...] I can't figure out what this would mean, or how it is relevant to open source as opposed to proprietary software. > to finding out people were misrepresenting my employment status while using my work in violation of the license, I don't think I've ever once had a positive experience with open source as a producer. Those last two seem exceptional. But you should report the person who was mocking you for making a mistake. That kind of behavior has no place in FLOSS and should be stamped out.
  • KirinDave 8y ago
    > I can't figure out what this would mean, or how it is relevant to open source as opposed to proprietary software. It's not unique to open source. > Those last two seem exceptional. But you should report the person who was mocking you for making a mistake. That kind of behavior has no place in FLOSS and should be stamped out. There is a reason I switched away from the MIT license. Someone unrelated was using my name and my work to give their startup legitimacy. It paid off, too, they are a sustainable company now. Not much I can do about it.
    • onli 8y ago
      I don't see how a different license would have helped you here? The license has no influence on someone misrepresenting your relationship with his company, that's just not covered in software licenses. You probably switched to GPL to make your software less directly usable for companies?
      • eesmith 8y ago
        The 3-clause BSD license includes: "Neither the name of the <organization> nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission."
• teddyh 8y ago
  Since you don’t give verifiable links to examples so we can judge for ourselves, and your reported experiences don’t match the majority’s, the rest of us are more or less forced to believe the simplest explanation: There’s a known principle that goes “If you think that everyone around you is an asshole, they’re not the assholes, you are.”. This would be the simplest explanation in this case, since we don’t know anything else about you. Of course, you could easily remedy this by posting enough examples to change our minds, but until you do, Occam’s razor must reign supreme.
  • detaro 8y ago
    Or they were just unlucky in their in their interactions (I doubt many people would claim that all interactions in Open Source are good), or perceive some things differently than others, or ... there's more than enough Open-Source maintainers complaining about bad interactions. Indeed many of the parents complaints are also reflected in the study as things people experienced as barriers to contributing. Luckily for many of them the good outweighs the bad, but that doesn't mean those for which it doesn't are automatically assholes. It's especially bad to justify this broad brush with "minority experience".
    • teddyh 8y ago
      Sure, there are many possible explanations, but what I wrote was the most likely one.
  • KirinDave 8y ago
    Nothing I can do can change the outcome either way, teddyh. I suspect you've already decided how you feel about me. People are seeing a candid discussion of subjective experience as an indictment of theirs. This is another action I regret. I thought perhaps a related but dissenting viewpoint would have value to the conversation, but I guess not. This conversation itself is an example of the kind of negative experience I'm talking about. I'm sorry my post offended you. It wasn't my intent.
    • teddyh 8y ago
• fundamental 8y ago
  > From the simplest cases like being ignored on PRs and tickets Yeah, this can be irksome when trying to lend a hand. As a maintainer of a few projects I try to put in a big effort to make PRs easy as you do have someone interested in rather directly helping the project. PRs also open up some opportunities to help guide new contributors which can be fun within itself (everyone has to start somewhere). In the best case scenario being friendly with PRs can result in a single drive-by patch turning into a more long term collaboration. I do also try to address other tickets, though I do admit that some just fall through the cracks. Many times the first submission will contain incomplete or inaccurate information and it takes a lot of work from both parties to document what the problem is and how to resolve it (even before touching any code). I do think it's great to see people trying to out a project by documenting issues in tickets, but sometimes it just takes too much energy at the end of the day to 'properly' address them when a project has many users, but few devs/contributors. > I've only had horrific experiences with my open source efforts. It's a shame that's been your experience. In an ideal world open source communities help people learn, build cool stuff, and scratch an itch, but it doesn't always work out.
• _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
  On the other hand, there are plenty of people who aren't going to bother even looking at your software unless it's open source, especially in certain domains. (That Apple released Swift as open source, for instance, is evidence of this, since they are generally not very positively oriented towards open source.)
• x3yyy 8y ago
  You have had a lot of negative responses (unjustified in my opinion), so I hope my comment makes it through. I have written two medium sized projects, one of which is quite popular. I had great fun writing the software, but maintaining it in public is hell. OSS has turned into a popularity contest, with people associating themselves with projects quite publicly (conference talks) but doing little work. Generally, there is little respect for creators, a lot of useless bickering and talking and self promotion. I've come to the same conclusion that it is a waste of time.
• beevai142 8y ago
  > From the simplest cases like being ignored on PRs You're not entitled to having your PRs merged, or even having anyone look at them. PRs not of particular interest to those maintaining the project simply get low priority. Especially with volunteer work, time is limited and while your PR might appear large and of importance to you, it may not look like that from other perspectives.