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The easy way to tell is to remember if you're paying them or not.
by buzzkillington 7y ago
The easy way to tell is to remember if you're paying them or not.
- onli 7y agoThat's not true at all. You can pay for amateur bullshit, and you can get professional software and support for free (and free as in freedom).
- buzzkillington 7y agoMy Ethernet is stuck in ipv6, professionally tell me how to fix it, for free.
- saagarjha 7y agoSure, could you provide some more detail?
- geofft 7y agoThat's not an open source project any of us maintain. Also, there are expectations for both sides of a professional interaction. My employer buys various fancy networking equipment for lots of money and we absolutely wouldn't expect an answer for that question.
- onli 7y agoI actually did that for years in a linux forum.
- oefrha 7y agoYou can get professional software and support for free, until you can’t. This “you’ve provided me free support once, so it’s your obligation to support me for free indefinitely whenever I ask” attitude has certainly contributed to my open source exhaustion as a maintainer.
- shkkmo 7y agoWell, good luck getting a company you paid for a product to provide indefinite support, large professional software companies cancel projects and EOL software all the time.
- Touche 7y agoYou only have a right to complain about the amateur bullshit you paid for, though.
- endorphone 7y agoYou have a right to complain about anything and everything. For instance, I don't pay a penny for HN but I can complain that these discussions sometimes become self-congratulatory prattle where angry people carrying a giant chip on their shoulder posit absurd, completely ridiculous notions and they're supported in their group delusion by like-minded parrots. You don't have to agree with my complaint, but nor do I need your or anyone else's permission to hold it.
- geofft 7y agoAbsolutely not. You can get professional (but not necessarily timely) support from me for multiple projects I maintain on GitHub, for free. For many people, their personal interest in open source is writing code for fun and showing it off. For others, it's making a product that people can rely on. The second one is my motivation; don't take that away from me.
- shkkmo 7y agoThe distinction between "amatuer" and "professional" is literally the motivation for the action, i.e. if you are doing it for enjoyment vs if you are doing it to get paid or advance your career. If you are making products that people can rely on primarily because you enjoy it, you are literally an amatuer. There are figurative connotations of quality and polish implicit with those terms, but I find those connotations unfortunate and in many cases unwarranted.
- geofft 7y agoSure. I'm not saying I am a professional. I'm saying I will provide professional-style support (according to the connotation), just not necessarily in a timely fashion, and it's demoralizing when other people say you should avoid my amateur software because they're leaning on the connotations of "amateur" and "professional."
- UncleMeat 7y agoThat’s fine. It’s even admirable if you to do that. But it isn’t and shouldn’t be mandatory.
- dodobirdlord 7y agoWhile “mandatory” would be a stretch, I don’t think there’s anything unreasonable about expecting project owners not to overstate the maintenance level of their projects. Deliberately conveying a false impression to people is called lying, and it’s generally regarded as being bad.