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> So seeing that this person is forcing people to pay to report bugs is absolutely wild. From your perspective, I can guess that it does seem wild. The issue i

> So seeing that this person is forcing people to pay to report bugs is absolutely wild. From your perspective, I can guess that it does seem wild. The issue is that you're getting paid for fixing other people's bugs. He's not.

huhtenberg 6y ago
What's jarring is that he's refusing to look at the bug reports. Not that he doesn't want to act on them. And, no, we don't fix "other people's bugs" either, just ours.
- phoe-krk 6y ago
  I can understand this behavior from the perspective where bug reports provide cost rather than value. If my piece of software works for me in my use cases and I am not interested in fixing it for other people (as is the case for the author), then bug reports are costs, rather than value. Minimizing costs in this scenario means refusing to accept costs (in this case, bug reports) unless something of value (in this case, money) makes this deal acceptable.
- singemonkey 6y ago
  What's weird about someone refusing to spend their limited time on things they don't want to deal with? Or do you think that reading and comprehension are activities that take no time at all, and therefore have no cost attached to them?
  - masto 6y ago
    I understand the point of the original article, since I agree that most people are entitled whiny jerks much of the time, myself included. I’m not here to argue that anyone should be obligated to provide help or fixes for their open source software, paid or otherwise. I do feel that’s an important point — paid or otherwise. There’s a similarly whiny attitude people have: “I paid $5 for your thing, so you have to do as I say!” I don’t really think the distinction is how much it cost. If you have a support contract that says “in exchange for paying me, I’ll help you with X, Y, and Z”, that’s a different story. But what I really wanted to remark on: to the point of “activities that take no time at all”, when I report a bug, I often spend hours of my time trying to understand what’s broken, narrowing it down to specific conditions and observations, often a attempting to fix it myself, and then writing everything up and whenever possible including test cases, screenshots, videos, etc. By the time I hit send on that bug, I may have contributed hundreds or thousands of dollars of my time to the project. It’s also possible to just take 5 seconds to fire off “your stupid app is broken your stupid too fix it”. All I’m saying is that painting all bug reports with the brush of “trying to get free support” discounts the amount of free QA open source projects can benefit from.
    - singemonkey 6y ago
      > I may have contributed hundreds or thousands of dollars of my time to the project Sure, but that was you deciding to do it, and it's commendable. This is very different from someone emailing you and telling you to (or expecting that you will) donate thousands of dollars of your time to a project.
- underdeserver 6y ago
  Looking at bug reports (as in, really looking) takes time. Time costs money.
wildmanx 6y ago
It's not other people's bugs. It's your bugs. You created them in the first place, and somebody is offering to help you _for free_ by reporting them. Charging them for helping you is outright stupid.
- Dayshine 6y ago
  > It's not other people's bugs. It's your bugs. It's not a bug if it doesn't affect my use-case. It's undefined behaviour at most. It might even be a bug if you compare to my specification, but, again, unless I have some reason to care about it (money, wanting the project to be good) then it's not a bug.
  - wildmanx 6y ago
    That's of course a determination you can make once the bug report comes in. But rejecting all reports outright without even looking is really missing out on one of the key advantages that open source culture brings to the table. This aspect is not specific to open source either. In my book, maintainers of proprietary software, and I'm one of those, are also making a huge mistake if they ignore bug reports from users. But in open source, it goes further, by inviting contributions even in form of patches for bugs or improvements. Not allowing any of those is what I call stupid in the above post.

huhtenberg 6y ago

What's jarring is that he's refusing to look at the bug reports. Not that he doesn't want to act on them. And, no, we don't fix "other people's bugs" either, just ours.

phoe-krk 6y ago
I can understand this behavior from the perspective where bug reports provide cost rather than value. If my piece of software works for me in my use cases and I am not interested in fixing it for other people (as is the case for the author), then bug reports are costs, rather than value. Minimizing costs in this scenario means refusing to accept costs (in this case, bug reports) unless something of value (in this case, money) makes this deal acceptable.
singemonkey 6y ago
What's weird about someone refusing to spend their limited time on things they don't want to deal with? Or do you think that reading and comprehension are activities that take no time at all, and therefore have no cost attached to them?
- masto 6y ago
  I understand the point of the original article, since I agree that most people are entitled whiny jerks much of the time, myself included. I’m not here to argue that anyone should be obligated to provide help or fixes for their open source software, paid or otherwise. I do feel that’s an important point — paid or otherwise. There’s a similarly whiny attitude people have: “I paid $5 for your thing, so you have to do as I say!” I don’t really think the distinction is how much it cost. If you have a support contract that says “in exchange for paying me, I’ll help you with X, Y, and Z”, that’s a different story. But what I really wanted to remark on: to the point of “activities that take no time at all”, when I report a bug, I often spend hours of my time trying to understand what’s broken, narrowing it down to specific conditions and observations, often a attempting to fix it myself, and then writing everything up and whenever possible including test cases, screenshots, videos, etc. By the time I hit send on that bug, I may have contributed hundreds or thousands of dollars of my time to the project. It’s also possible to just take 5 seconds to fire off “your stupid app is broken your stupid too fix it”. All I’m saying is that painting all bug reports with the brush of “trying to get free support” discounts the amount of free QA open source projects can benefit from.
  - singemonkey 6y ago
    > I may have contributed hundreds or thousands of dollars of my time to the project Sure, but that was you deciding to do it, and it's commendable. This is very different from someone emailing you and telling you to (or expecting that you will) donate thousands of dollars of your time to a project.
underdeserver 6y ago
Looking at bug reports (as in, really looking) takes time. Time costs money.

wildmanx 6y ago

It's not other people's bugs. It's your bugs. You created them in the first place, and somebody is offering to help you _for free_ by reporting them. Charging them for helping you is outright stupid.

Dayshine 6y ago
> It's not other people's bugs. It's your bugs. It's not a bug if it doesn't affect my use-case. It's undefined behaviour at most. It might even be a bug if you compare to my specification, but, again, unless I have some reason to care about it (money, wanting the project to be good) then it's not a bug.
- wildmanx 6y ago
  That's of course a determination you can make once the bug report comes in. But rejecting all reports outright without even looking is really missing out on one of the key advantages that open source culture brings to the table. This aspect is not specific to open source either. In my book, maintainers of proprietary software, and I'm one of those, are also making a huge mistake if they ignore bug reports from users. But in open source, it goes further, by inviting contributions even in form of patches for bugs or improvements. Not allowing any of those is what I call stupid in the above post.