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But how do you square your views with OSS projects that aren't Mozilla? How about those that truly are volunteer OSS projects that the developers don't get paid

by jimevan 15y ago

But how do you square your views with OSS projects that aren't Mozilla? How about those that truly are volunteer OSS projects that the developers don't get paid for? I contribute to a large, popular OSS project, and much of the blog post rings true for me. Full disclosure: I am not an employee of Mozilla Corporation.

illumen 15y ago
Some communities do better than others at making it a nice environment for all involved. For example, post a question on some mailing lists and you'll get flamed or told RTFM noob stfu. On other projects everyone is nice, happy and it's all warm hugs. If the developers or other community members are getting abused, that is not on. There's really no excuse. However, having developers call their users 'dicks' is also something that should not happen. There's things that communities can do to make them develop nicer for everyone involved. Community development is a massive topic, but basically people need to work on making the communities nicer. The basics like: managing peoples expectations, being transparent, respecting the time people put into things can go a long way towards making a better environment. I think bug trackers like Bugzilla don't do an awesome job from the perspective of the bug reporter. Once they report a bug, they have an expectation that someone is going to fix their problem. I think that's the wrong way to get people to think about open source projects, and it sets the wrong expectations - which leads to people getting angry, and frustrated. This post, and others from developers and users show to me that Mozilla has a problem which is being caused in part by their bug tracker, or how the bug tracker is used. Big communities can often turn out bad too. Which is why growing a community may not be the best thing to do. A famous comedian is asked about where he does his experimental comedy - and he answers that he is not telling, because he wants his little club night to stay small. The comedians who run it do it as an artistic thing, and they don't want too many people coming along and spoiling it. So this famous comedian did not want a plug on the radio show by this journalist, because it would grow his community too big. Some of the nicer open source communities keep commercial things away from the project because that would spoil the fun. The project could probably be better with more commercial involvement, but some projects choose not to have that happen. Mixing commercial and non commercial development is another hard thing that mozilla does. I mean, why are the bug reporters and testers not getting paid, but some developers are? I know the reasons, and am not saying it should be different - just that can cause tensions. Open source communities are a very important thing to talk about, and to make better. Especially if people are going to be interacting in them so much. We all have a lot to learn and improve on, since we have problems now.

by jimevan 15y ago

illumen 15y ago

Some communities do better than others at making it a nice environment for all involved. For example, post a question on some mailing lists and you'll get flamed or told RTFM noob stfu. On other projects everyone is nice, happy and it's all warm hugs. If the developers or other community members are getting abused, that is not on. There's really no excuse. However, having developers call their users 'dicks' is also something that should not happen. There's things that communities can do to make them develop nicer for everyone involved. Community development is a massive topic, but basically people need to work on making the communities nicer. The basics like: managing peoples expectations, being transparent, respecting the time people put into things can go a long way towards making a better environment. I think bug trackers like Bugzilla don't do an awesome job from the perspective of the bug reporter. Once they report a bug, they have an expectation that someone is going to fix their problem. I think that's the wrong way to get people to think about open source projects, and it sets the wrong expectations - which leads to people getting angry, and frustrated. This post, and others from developers and users show to me that Mozilla has a problem which is being caused in part by their bug tracker, or how the bug tracker is used. Big communities can often turn out bad too. Which is why growing a community may not be the best thing to do. A famous comedian is asked about where he does his experimental comedy - and he answers that he is not telling, because he wants his little club night to stay small. The comedians who run it do it as an artistic thing, and they don't want too many people coming along and spoiling it. So this famous comedian did not want a plug on the radio show by this journalist, because it would grow his community too big. Some of the nicer open source communities keep commercial things away from the project because that would spoil the fun. The project could probably be better with more commercial involvement, but some projects choose not to have that happen. Mixing commercial and non commercial development is another hard thing that mozilla does. I mean, why are the bug reporters and testers not getting paid, but some developers are? I know the reasons, and am not saying it should be different - just that can cause tensions. Open source communities are a very important thing to talk about, and to make better. Especially if people are going to be interacting in them so much. We all have a lot to learn and improve on, since we have problems now.