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This is the reason I don't work on free software anymore. The entitlement of the users was too great and their demands were too unreasonable. More than once p
by phone8675309 3y ago
This is the reason I don't work on free software anymore. The entitlement of the users was too great and their demands were too unreasonable.
More than once people have threatened to: sue me, dox me, put a bomb in my mailbox, assault me, kill me, kill my family, sexually assault me, sexually assault my family, plant a bomb under my car, get me fired from work, and spread lies about me on the Internet.
I'm aware that they're a minority of the users of free software. I get that they're probably mentally ill or going through it. I get that maybe they're just a few terrible people, but they by far were the most common messages in my email box from users - users who liked the software or even found it useful weren't enthusiastic enough about letting me know about that. For every 20 threats I got I'd get maybe one message thanking me for the software.
You know what nobody ever did? Offer to pay me a couple of dollars for either consulting support or to implement a feature they needed, but they were more than happy to threaten me with legal action if there was a bug that I had no way to test for.
- necovek 3y agoI did most of my work on Gnome, admittedly when internet was a different place, and only ever got a few minor "you are dumb doing things this or that way". I got plenty of praise and even a job at a well known free software company back in late 2000s.