4 ms·
The thing is, showing the annoyance to the volunteer, who is already doing their best, has two possible outcomes: 1) they stop volunteering 2) they will ignor
by lukaslalinsky 4mo ago
The thing is, showing the annoyance to the volunteer, who is already doing their best, has two possible outcomes:
1) they stop volunteering
2) they will ignore you
In neither of that is your issue solved. So maybe it's better to deal with the frustration on your own and then file a bug report.
- dragontamer 4mo agoThere must be some degree of communication from customers to developers. Even if it is a free volunteer service. Poor communication results in professionals firing the customer as well. None of this is exclusive to OSS of volunteer effort. But the communication in general is necessary. This is just product management and communication issues. There is an perceived problem and the problem MUST be communicated. Problems aren't solved by shutting up and ignoring things. And based on the discussion in this topic, it's clear there's a lot of people who are worried about rsync code quality here.
- akerl_ 4mo agoThese are not customers.
- 306bobby 4mo ago[flagged]
- akerl_ 4mo agoThat’s exactly what I was calling out. Customers pay money for goods and services. They thus get a bunch of social, ethical, and legal positions in terms of their relationship with the seller. Rsync is an open source project that its maintainers put onto the Internet. People who use it are not customers, and they do not have the right to expectations around how the maintainers will change the software or change how they develop it.
- dragontamer 4mo agoYou've never had a customer in your professional setting who didn't pay money for goods and/or services? Yet it was very important for your boss (and therefore you, as a programmer) to service their every whim? Customers are customers. Whether they're paying or not. Not all customers are worth servicing (even with infinite money offered, "firing a customer" is important to keep the community in check). But this isn't a situation where the RSYNC maintainer should fire the customer. There's a LOT of backlash to this release. Even if this one particular customer is a bit of an ass, there's plenty of good users in that 90+ comment chain (hundreds now?) where this regression has clearly struck a nerve.
- akerl_ 4mo agoThis is not a professional setting. This is an open source project that somebody published to the internet. Using it does not make you a customer, and it doesn’t matter if it “struck a nerve” with users.
- dragontamer 4mo agoWell in my professional setting, I deal with non-paying customers all the time. They're still customers and I'm still expected to listen to them. It was better when a dedicated PM was shielding me from this crap but here we are. Deciding who and who not to listen to is just part of project management.
- lukaslalinsky 4mo agoLook, it's not that long time ago when we had the xz malware. The pattern is always the same. Maintainer of the project is doing X, people start to pressure them to do something else, maintainer gives up and opens the project up to other maintainers, and then many things can happen. If there is any lesson from the incident, open source maintainers should never allow the pressure to happen, ignore it if it's too strong, block people. Rsync has been maintained for a very long time. Bugs happen, even regression bugs happen. People don't get to dictate how should the volunteer do development.
- akerl_ 4mo agoIf I were the rsync maintainer I’d probably set the repo to only allow issues and PRs from prior contributors until people learn to behave.
- dragontamer 4mo agoYes. That's called firing the customer in my line of work. This doesn't seem egregious enough to fire the customer.
- akerl_ 4mo agoAgain, this is not work and they are not customers. This is somebody spending their free time on code they enjoy and then putting the result online. The reason businesses are careful about which customers they fire is because they want to keep having customers. Open source maintainers have no reason to deal with that shit.
- dragontamer 4mo agoThen he can fire the customer. By simply closing the issue.
- account42 4mo agoNo this is part of the foundation that many open computing systems are built on. It's long past being just someone's experimental personal repo.
- pibaker 4mo agoBefore you call yourself a customer of an FOSS project, perhaps show us the receipt that a monetary transaction had actually taken place between you and the developer. Otherwise, you're just a beggar. And beggars don't get to choose.
- bakugo 4mo agoIf committing thousands of lines of unreviewed AI generated code is "doing their best", I'd argue that them not contributing anymore would be a net benefit for the project.
- lukaslalinsky 4mo agoThat's possible, but who are you to tell a person what they should and shouldn't do in their free time.
- account42 4mo agoNo longer volunteering is not an obviously worse outcome than volunteering negative value contributions.