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Exploring this thought. Most of the time this argument surfaces, it’s from developers who are being paid (donations, salary, grants, etc) to work on the softwar

Exploring this thought. Most of the time this argument surfaces, it’s from developers who are being paid (donations, salary, grants, etc) to work on the software. Why do we expect different behavior from end users just because the output carries the OSS designation? If you’re getting paid to work on software, you should give a damn about your users, since without them you wouldn’t be getting paid. And it’s not like working on OSS is some kind of sacrifice; it’s not like paid work on an OSS project prevents you from also getting a job at a place like Google.

nerdponx 4y ago
The article is describing the opposite situation, where the contributors and maintainers are unpaid volunteers, while the end users are paid employees of some company. Moreover, the article is describing the specific but sadly common situation of a maintainer caring too much about their users, past the point where it makes sense to care about them, leading to maintainer disillusionment and burn out.
- falcolas 4y ago
  The article is written by the primary contributor to homebrew and based off the author's interactions with users. Homebrew does indeed have both sponsors and donations... https://github.com/homebrew/brew#donations https://github.com/homebrew/brew#donations And I find it beyond credibility to believe that the primary contributor is not taking any money for his work on homebrew. Because while homebrew undoubtedly costs some money to host, a vast majority of the hosting is done using GitHub's public repositories.
  - nerdponx 4y ago
    Right, and if the company depending on Homebrew had entered into a paid support contract, things would be very different. It's very clear that they do already give quite a lot of a damn about their users. I don't see how are you could get an impression otherwise. There are plenty of examples of organizations that do not give a damn about their users, but this is absolutely not one of them. Your argument seems to be something along the lines of "somebody at some point is paying them for some amount of the work they do on this product, therefore it is their duty to cater to every end-user complaint and request, no matter how capricious, misinformed, or selfish". I don't agree with that premise at all and I suspect that most other people wouldn't either.

nerdponx 4y ago

The article is describing the opposite situation, where the contributors and maintainers are unpaid volunteers, while the end users are paid employees of some company. Moreover, the article is describing the specific but sadly common situation of a maintainer caring too much about their users, past the point where it makes sense to care about them, leading to maintainer disillusionment and burn out.

falcolas 4y ago
The article is written by the primary contributor to homebrew and based off the author's interactions with users. Homebrew does indeed have both sponsors and donations... https://github.com/homebrew/brew#donations https://github.com/homebrew/brew#donations And I find it beyond credibility to believe that the primary contributor is not taking any money for his work on homebrew. Because while homebrew undoubtedly costs some money to host, a vast majority of the hosting is done using GitHub's public repositories.
- nerdponx 4y ago
  Right, and if the company depending on Homebrew had entered into a paid support contract, things would be very different. It's very clear that they do already give quite a lot of a damn about their users. I don't see how are you could get an impression otherwise. There are plenty of examples of organizations that do not give a damn about their users, but this is absolutely not one of them. Your argument seems to be something along the lines of "somebody at some point is paying them for some amount of the work they do on this product, therefore it is their duty to cater to every end-user complaint and request, no matter how capricious, misinformed, or selfish". I don't agree with that premise at all and I suspect that most other people wouldn't either.