9 ms·

The reason people burn out on open source

243 points by clukic 12y ago

gear54rus 12y ago
I'm not sure I understand, what is there to see in this link? Is there some underlying message to all this? Oh well, the issue was handled poorly or maybe the guy just went too far with this accusations, so what? How'd this get to the front page?:O
- acomjean 12y ago
  I think it's the entitled aspect of some open source users this is demonstrating. They expect everything to be the way they want it. they want all opensourced stuff to be polished, supported and free, without wanting to help out or chiping in.
  - thanksalot 12y ago
    >they want all opensourced stuff to be polished That would be nice though. Why would you release something to the public and put your name on it if it's lazily done?
    - acomjean 12y ago
      This would be ideal, but in my experience evaluating some open source libraries, they were clearly works in progress or abandoned. I think people had good intentions when putting the stuff out there. Maybe because github is free for public open source, stuff gets put out there before its polished?
    - scarygliders 12y ago
      Isn't the whole point of Open Sourcing your stuff, is so that others can contribute to it if they so desire? Whether or not something is "lazily done" is besides the point. The point is - they produced _something_, and the consumer did not. If you see something which you think could be done in a better way, wouldn't a better use of your time be spent issuing a pull request with your suggested improvement, rather than whining that "it was lazily done" ?
    - b0ti 12y ago
      > Why would you release something to the public and put your name on it if it's lazily done? No software is perfect. It has either no features in it or has bugs. The assholes will either demand to get the missing features added or the bugs fixed.
  - anon1385 12y ago
    On the other hand, people use open source to market themselves to promote their talks, books and consultancy gigs. You have to accept the negative sides of that as well. People will start to question the motivations of your contributions. People will be annoyed when the code you promoted has faults in it. Once you are doing things for commercial gain then people's attitudes towards you will shift. That seems inevitable.
  - Iftheshoefits 12y ago
    Your comment and (as of this comment, anyway) the thread of replies is one reason why I think using a person's opensource contributions as part of an evaluation of their suitability for employment is a bit ridiculous. There is a whole range of completely arbitrary and subjective "measures" around such contributions, and they end up being no better filters than any of the other (flawed) filters people use to evaluate such things these days. It may have held (marginally greater) value at some point, but at this point it is just another bullet point clueless HR managers and petty managers can stick next to the "alphabet soup" in their job descriptions.
    - wahnfrieden 12y ago
      This is overly cynical. It can be a meaningful positive indicator, and simply not a data point if a candidate lacks one.
      - Iftheshoefits 12y ago
        That's overly charitable. It can be a meaningful positive indicator, but only the same way that any other work experience can be. Compare that with the proliferation of requirements for experience in specific languages rather than for specific (but more general) engineering ability, and I think my cynical take isn't overly cynical at all.
- nraynaud 12y ago
  someone wanted to launch the hivemind against the bug reporter because he was not deferential enough. The irony being that the victim is a member of Ember.js who is bullying the rest of open source on twitter while touting how they are saving Africa from a Portland coffee shop.
  - Aeolun 12y ago
    Not 'not deferential enough', bug reporter is a general asshat. Maintainer seemed well aware of that and replied in kind. It doesn't matter that the people you are bullying are bullies themselves, that doesn't make your bullying in any way ok.
- kiallmacinnes 12y ago
  I think this post is attempting to make the exact opposite point? The issue reporter is effectively ranting that the gem isn't good enough, and because it's called "emoji", he for whatever reasons feels entitled to this rant. I don't see anything wrong with the maintainers response..
- scarygliders 12y ago
  When the producers of open source programs, scripts, and utilities spend some of their time, intelligence, and thought on this planet to produce something useful and give that product of their effort away for free, it gets seriously disenheartening to have someone else make a dumb comment, or create an issue out of anger which is unjustified due to the consumer of that product not having read either the documentation, or the source code they decided to use. Other ways of pissing us off are asking a question which is obviously facepalm-inducingly stupid due to again not having read the documentation/code, or trying to use the product whilst simulataneously not having the first clue on what they're doing (which could be because they're new at coding or handling computer systems in general). When a producer of Free Stuff gets the kind of bullcrap described above, it wears them down over time. I have encountered this with my stuff - especially in comments on my blog. I do try to answer questions and be as helpful as possible, but there are some people out there who you just know can't be bothered to do some basic research, or read your helpful instructions, or are basically just too lazy to learn and only want to consume without thinking. This is what wears people down. It's not just one crappy issue being raised on your stuff in Github, it's the accumulation of this cruft over time - like hundreds of straws piling up on your camel's back - eventually it'll break.
  - Sorgam 12y ago
    Keep in mind that every alternative free library to do something adds cost to the task of selecting a library. Some open source projects (not suggesting any specifically) actually do make life worse for people because they spend time studying it only to find it's not useful.
    - scarygliders 12y ago
      In my book, spending the time to see whether something is useful (or works) or not, is called "due diligence". I'm also of the opinion that the time spent raking through libraries that look useful to you to find out if they really are useful to you, more than offsets time you'll spend looking for bugs in your program which were caused by using something which turned out to not do what you thought it did.
  - 12y ago
- maxsilver 12y ago
  It's a silly and petty jab at the maintainer of a small open source project. Fighting with people on these "complaints masked as a fake issue" is one reason people sometimes burn out on maintaining open source projects. - - For a similar scenario: Imagine if some tiny indie band put up a song or two on their own website for free. Now imagine if the top response said "You songs aren't as good as Taylor Swift's songs. You should disclose that your band isn't Taylor Swift, so I don't waste my time listening to this, and you should take these songs down and replace them with pirated copies of Taylor Swift songs, because I like them better" That's effectively what's happening on this issue, in open-source-code form.
  - nraynaud 12y ago
    He didn't pick on the underdog, don't give this false impression. The bug report was certainly not nice, but it was not answered by an unknown anonymous grunt of the open source movement, we're talking 15k followers on twitter.
- Napoleon1963 12y ago
  Maybe it's because it involves Steve Klabnik, who is a prominent commenter here? While the tone of the report may not have been very polite, it is understandable why the reporter was disappointed. I think it's perfectly reasonable for a user to ask that a library's deficiencies be made obvious in some way, regardless of why they exist. The readme file is a good place for this. I don't think that Steve handled it very well at all, though. Calling the report creator an "ass" is uncalled for. Creating unnecessary drama over a perfectly reasonable request is uncalled for. Closing the bug without adding a line or two to the readme file addressing this deficiency is uncalled for. Preventing further discussion is uncalled for.
  - scarygliders 12y ago
    Perhaps if the issue was raised as a pull request with the desired changes to the Readme, rather than just raising the issue as a general whine. The whine itself stinks of someone not having gone through the source to see if the product really does what they want it to do. It reeks of "hey this looks like what I want YOINK! " , implementing it in their code, and discovering afterwards that some Things are missing. Then getting pissed off at the producer of the product, rather than at themselves for their oversight/laziness.
    - cpncrunch 12y ago
      I shouldn't have to look through the source code to see if a library does what I want it to do.
      - carols10cents 12y ago
        That is absolutely what you have to do with open source. If you aren't willing to do that, don't use OSS.
        cpncrunch 12y ago
        I've been using open source for 20 years and I don't think I've ever had to do that. Sometimes I have to fix bugs in a library or ditch it because it's a piece of crap. However you generally shouldn't have to read the source code to see what it actually does. If so, that's just laziness on the part of the author (and it's wasting everyone's time).
- grokys 12y ago
  I think the "Public Contributions" section of the two users says it all: https://github.com/jakelodwick https://github.com/jakelodwick https://github.com/steveklabnik https://github.com/steveklabnik
_ZeD_ 12y ago
By the way... what is the raison d'etre of this gem? I just don't get why anyone think it's a good idea to replace a character with an image. It's like to replace all "e" characters in this comment with a .png congaing a fancy custom "e"...
- slapresta 12y ago
  > It's like to replace all "e" characters in this comment with a .png congaing a fancy custom "e"... So, uh, like Web Fonts, then?
  - _ZeD_ 12y ago
    you mean "in a totally different way", do you? you are comparing a gem replacing, in a string with html content, a text fragment with an '<img />' tag, with a way to load and apply custom font from a remote location to a web page text region. While, closing one eye, the effect of the two solution are similar, the solutions are totally different from the technological point of view, from the abstraction layer when they are applied to the practical implications (try to do a simple cut-n-paste from the browser to a text editor, for example)
    - slapresta 12y ago
      I know they're technically different; what I wanted to point out is that it's not such a far-fetched idea.
- yuchi 12y ago
  Mostly because a lot of browsers do not support emojis at all, and they’ve become pretty ubiquitous.
  - NhanH 12y ago
    They're a mean to be expressive via text ... and I really hate the fact that apps are replacing the text with the image. I can always recognize what a string of emoji is supposed to be (there will be obscure one, but then that's entirely dependent on who you're communicating with). Replacing the emoji with the image means that I now have to decipher the image. Not to mention that everyone does it differently. For example, ":))" and "=))" is not the same, and it's really hard to guess which one is which in most of the apps. Yes, I know this whole comment is silly...
67726e 12y ago
The reason I stopped being the maintainer on a popular jQuery library was the wave after wave of incompetent folks asking me to do their work for them. I don't mean mere API questions, or asking things around how the plugin works or does what it does. These were entire "Integrate this for me" questions. People unwilling to do the bare minimum of work. No matter how many examples or how much documentation, these folks flat out wouldn't do their own work. Beyond that, most of these weren't being asked by some 12-year old learning to code, these people would link to their commercial site and expect me to "Give them teh codez" In retrospect, I should have taken the hard-line approach and directed everyone to StackOverflow and limit GitHub to an issue tracker. When it came to assholes making asshole comments and requests, I had no problem telling them to stick their overbearing request where the sun doesn't shine. Of course those folks were few and far in between.
- tomjen3 12y ago
  If you ever want to go back in OSS development, include a disclaimer that you are more than willing to integrate it into their site, at your usual rate of $X00 dollars per hour, with a minimum of $Y hours. The worst that might happen is that somebody takes you up on that.
  - snorkel 12y ago
    Agree. The way to answer"do my work for me" is "Thank you for inquiring about Commercial Support offerings ...."
  - izacus 12y ago
    That does not really help - people he's talking about simply do not read and do not care about what you did. Going through bunch of soul-sucking emails/messages/issues every day, even if you do not answer, is a huge demotivator for any public development work :/
    - e40 12y ago
      Why can they simply be ignored? I run a support department (for a closed source product) and we do this all the time.
fjarlq 12y ago
The user who filed that bug is Jake Lodwick, co-founder of Vimeo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jake_Lodwick https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jake_Lodwick
- xtrumanx 12y ago
  Anyone else feel uncomfortable by the above comment.
  - steinnes 12y ago
    Not really, I think both guys in the issue discussion are obviously very smart, and I can identify with their respective frustrations. I do think Jake's comments are a little harsh as the README refers to Phantom Open Emoji in the 2nd paragraph -- however if I had just spent hours debugging something like this, making an annoyed issue on GitHub could be the outcome.
    - deleted 12y ago
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  - WorldWideWayne 12y ago
    Why should they? Jake already revealed his full name over at Github.
    - xtrumanx 12y ago
      If Reddit has taught me anything it's that linking information about someone people may dislike sometimes leads to harassment. Hopefully the HN crowd is mature enough to engage in such tactics but I have a very low faith in any internet community in general.
      - wismer 12y ago
        At least HN is a notch above GamerGate
      - 12y ago
nox_ 12y ago
Replying with an attack and closing comments is definitely something a douchebag would do. Free or opensource doesn't mean you get to be irresponsible about what you release or maintain, if your project has some caveats they should be listed explicitly.
- carols10cents 12y ago
  Actually, it does-- have you ever even READ the MIT license? THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
textphone 12y ago
Same reason people burn out on Hacker News. Independent developer consultants, as a demographic, significantly skews towards a larger-than-average number of people who were never surrounded by a good professional office culture. Many never learned the benefits or skills of writing in ways that won't be interpreted as mean. In fact, many pride themselves in trying to be the opposite of a professional behaving office person. Toxic culture, loves to point out the tiniest flaws in everyone else's work and don't care or realize that doing so is hurting others. Case in point, Hacker News was a much happier place that was more receptive to positively responding to people sharing their work, back when it was Startup News. Inviting in all kinds of hackers, ended up bringing in the worst of the worst segment of the demographic. I love doing developer consulting, I know many awesome consultants who behave great, but the average behavior of the demographic as a whole is is really bad.
- x1024 12y ago
  Counterpoint: "Corporate culture" environments where everyone is at "Stepford Wives" level of jollyness rarely get much done.
  - textphone 12y ago
    Who do you really think gets more done: The people who show up to whine and criticize, or the people who hold back the whining to silently go and make their own improved solution instead? Consider that people who wine, seem to outnumber the people who do by at least 1000 to 1, and you'll have my answer for who I believe to be contributing more to getting things done.
    - x1024 12y ago
      So... you are saying that if a whiner contributes at least 1/1000th as much as a normal person, the whiner is better for humanity? I'm not sure I follow...
    - protonfish 12y ago
      There is no contest: it is the environment where frequent, uncensored criticism is tolerated or even encouraged. That guy who is silently working on their own solution? Without listening to feedback from his peers (or, more likely, his betters) his work is probably junk that nobody wants or worse - something that will cause more problems than it solves. Before I worked in software I noticed companies would have two cultures. A "shop" culture where workers can wear casual clothes, swear, kick stuff, and at the end of the day, get things working, and the "front office" that focused on sales. You never knew if a client was on the phone or in the office so workers dressed well and any negative speech was strictly forbidden. Because programmers work at a desk, they are shoehorned into front office culture. This has probably done more harm to the productivity of software projects than any other factor. Just this year I watched a small software project (one that a small team of competent developers, QA, and a BA could have completed in several weeks) waste millions of dollars (some say hundreds of millions - the real figure (in the true spirit of front office culture) would be "rude" to tell) before being cancelled. I saw this train wreck coming a mile away and documented the issues and forwarded them to my supervisor but it made no difference. In defense of the company I work for, at least they didn't fire me. It is pure front office culture to blame the whistle blowers for failure. And don't even start with "Oh, you just need to say it in the nicest, politest manner!" There is no way to tell somebody they are wrong and have to change in a "nice" way. Your organization either can focus on the quality of the end product and encourage criticism or focus on appearance and censor it. But if you choose the latter, unless your project is a con, it is doomed from the start.
gorhill 12y ago
Regardless of the specifics of this case, I do feel like there is such a thing as "burning out on open source", a topic which is of interest to me at this point. I would like to read other people insights about this, this would probably help me better at setting proper boundaries in my own projects. I found myself often struggling to deal with this kind of issue: How to be sure whether you are being used (possibly not even on purpose), or whether the issue raised really benefit the whole project? On one hand we don't want to be used, on the other hand, we don't want to chill contributions of good ideas. It can be tough sometimes to assess properly (keeping in mind we all have bad days on top of all this).
- b0ti 12y ago
  I had a similar "open source burnout" recently. Since you asked for it, there is a blog post I wrote which might be of interest: http://nxlog-ce.sourceforge.net/why-the-gpl-does-not-work http://nxlog-ce.sourceforge.net/why-the-gpl-does-not-work
  - gorhill 12y ago
    I don't relate to your blog post. I am definitely not second guessing my use of GPL. That is another topic than the one here as far as I am concerned.
benihana 12y ago
A pull request where two guys acted like jackasses towards each other, and where we instinctively try to pick sides based on our past experiences and beliefs. I think really thinking on why I'm siding with one person almost immediately despite not having much context in this is really revealing and maybe not a little unpleasant.
- yownie 12y ago
  so much this ++
- nailer 12y ago
  Actually while I posted earlier about the 'show me the codes' people, this guy isn't really one of them and I might have felt bad for implying it was. It might be reasonable for an emoji library to say 'ALPHA: missing a few characters' to stop people from trying to debug non-existent rendering problems - but he puts this in a very aggressive manner. As you said, they're both wrong (and right) in their own ways.
- deleted 12y ago
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  - michaelhoffman 12y ago
    Almost all countries are signatories of the Berne Convention, meaning that works are under copyright protection automatically, without requiring copyright notices. Similarly, no license mentioned means that you only have the rights given to you by law (such as fair use or fair dealing).
- sylvinus 12y ago
  One of the guys wrote something and published it as open source. The other got to use it for free but still complains with an inappropriate tone. Hard not to side with the first one by default.
  - 54mf 12y ago
    Offering incomplete software as open source doesn't make it any less incomplete. Are we giving out blue ribbons for participation now?
underachieve 12y ago
The point I don't get is why he complains about that gem when he obviously found an alternative that better suited his needs. Why for heaven's sake not just use this but raise an issue. If we all started raising issues for something being "not what I was looking for" github would be bursting at the seams.
tschellenbach 12y ago
Yes it's hard at times, I especially have trouble maintaining Django-Facebook as both of those dependencies change so freakingly fast. Let me know if you want to help out :) https://github.com/tschellenbach/Django-facebook https://github.com/tschellenbach/Django-facebook
underachieve 12y ago
The point I don't get is why he complains about that gem when he obviously found an alternative that better suited his needs. Why for heaven's sake not just use this but raise an issue. If we all started raising issues for for something beeing "not what I was looking for" github would be bursting at the seams. Is he really moping about the fact that the readme does not provide a full list of ALL emojis and whether they are supported? And why is a emoji gem required to work with "massage" and "satellite"?
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frontsideair 12y ago
Why can't everyone be nice to each other? </naive>
g534345 12y ago
I'm maintaining a small open source mobile app. The app is fairly popular and well liked. However, there are also a lot of people who just send comments to the app store that the app is useless without feature x or is total crap if I don't change something. Nowadays, I get anxiety when I just think that I should go to the app store and read the latest comments. I understand that open source is about community and things should be made together. However, I haven't really got any contributions except few language translations. I'm getting tired of the app and sadly it will be the last open source software I'll release under my own name. From now on, I'll just dump the source to somewhere and forget about it. Or keep the source closed. Writing software, even open source software, should be fun. It shouldn't mean that one person writes everything and others complain that it isn't enough.
- mahouse 12y ago
  If you get anxiety when you to have read what others think about your app, your problems are somewhere else.. mostly taking into account that you're uploading it to the app store, a place where almost nobody knows what open source is and they don't even care.
- xioxox 12y ago
  The app store problem is also there in various review sites. For instance, my plotting app gets quite a few satisfied users, albeit very few external contributions, but it get some extremely lousy reviews from people who've run it for two minutes and not read the documentation, particularly on Mac websites, e.g. https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/21029/veusz https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/21029/veusz (a site where I didn't even upload it).
332451b 12y ago
This is the same strategy I've used in open source projects. Handling the report is annoying, but then having to go spend time fixing the issue to help someone who is being an ass is soul draining. And it only encourages them and other people to be an ass to get what they want. So I call them out and close or delete the issue, and if they get frustrated because of that, great! This doesn't mean I won't fix the issue eventually, just on my own terms without giving that person the satisfaction. Makes me feel a lot better.
rcfox 12y ago
> I like your gem otherwise, but it's called "emoji", implying that it's the Ruby library for handling those characters. That's not the first time I've encountered this assumption. I can believe that it makes sense, if you're will to willing to play the part of the layman user: "I want emojis, so I'll just do: gem install emoji" However, I don't think it's too unreasonable for people with some basic level of experience to understand that there's no central authority granting library names. If it were a core library that came with the interpreter, sure, it's fair to expect that that is the library you're supposed to use. When you get into community-sourced libraries, names are just granted on a first-come, first-served basis for whatever service is hosting them.
- trvz 12y ago
  > When you get into community-sourced libraries, names are just granted on a first-come, first-served basis for whatever service is hosting them. Maybe they shouldn't be. I dislike Apache being called httpd in yum, as compared to apache2 in apt. I can see how a package called markdown wouldn't be a port of the original, but CommonMark, and that would be misleading, too. If a package managing system doesn't care, it loses some pride in my eye.
- leoc 12y ago
  The lack of a central authority for names hardly absolve individual library creators/maintainers of the responsibility to choose appropriate names; closer to the opposite, surely.
codebeaker 12y ago
Maintainer of Capistrano here, I've been close to FOSS burnout a couple of times, and more often than I would like people catch the sharp end of my tongue. I can count on one hand how many issues have been opened with a corresponding PR, and from those, barely any ever come with tests, or acknowledge the stuff in the CONTRIBUTING file (Github includes a "Before opening this issue, check this project's guidelines). Fortunately there are couple of people who consistently tackle issues that the lazy people have opened, and submit super high quality PRs with unit and functional tests, documentation and entries in the CHANGELOG. These people are the main reason that I still work on FOSS. My solution was to make heavy use of labels at GH, the "needs more info" and "feature request" ones are obnoxious colours. Second to that, I bought a TextExpander licence, and setup a bunch of macros `notanissue` which expands to: > Closing because I’m not sure this is an issue, if you are convinced that this is really a bug, please feel free to re-open the issue and add more information (your versions (Ruby, Cap, etc), your Capfile, your logs, and relevant sections out of your Gemfile) > Otherwise support is done via the mailing list (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/capistrano https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/capistrano) or at StackOverflow (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/capistrano http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/capistrano) with questions tagged `capistrano`. And a number of others 'contrib' for contribution guidelines when a PR is in conflict with them, etc. It's helped lighten the load a lot, and now tend to invest heavily in grooming the issue list, and keeping things neat and tidy at GH. I dare guess, when I'm awake 90% of the issues are classified, or closed within 5 minutes of being opened, this has helped a lot with the feeling of pressure and constant nagging with which I've previously suffered. Of course, maintaining a large project is a burden, but it comes with career and profile benefits.
- weaksauce 12y ago
  Thanks for your hard work on the project! You have improved the lives of many working programmers. What are you looking for for the future of Capistrano? The problem and major benefit to github is how easy it is to contribute. Sometimes it's like a high maintenance low paying customer vs. a high paying customer that treats you like a professional and gets out of your way I guess.
  - 12y ago
billsix 12y ago
Yet he mocked the existence of a open source project not that long ago https://harthur.wordpress.com/2013/01/24/771/ https://harthur.wordpress.com/2013/01/24/771/
- fnordfnordfnord 12y ago
  I remember this controversy. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5106767 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5106767 Edit: See also: steveklabnik's apology. http://blog.steveklabnik.com/posts/2013-01-23-node http://blog.steveklabnik.com/posts/2013-01-23-node
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jonathanwallace 12y ago
Pertinent follow-up. Jake was naive about open source norms. See twitter conversations: https://twitter.com/jonathanwallace/status/533680518009614336 https://twitter.com/jonathanwallace/status/53368051800961433... https://twitter.com/jonathanwallace/status/533679332590628864 https://twitter.com/jonathanwallace/status/53367933259062886...
- dmpk2k 12y ago
  Maybe naive, but also impolite. Opening an issue with a passive-aggressive tone isn't likely to be productive.
  - aaronem 12y ago
    That's really the problem here. Ignorance is excusable, especially in someone who hasn't got a lot of experience yet. Rude ignorance is never so, especially around a library on Github where, if it's really that big a damn deal to you, you can always just fork, edit a big "THIS IS NOT APPLE COLOR EMOJI" note into the readme, open a PR, and see what happens.
- 332451b 12y ago
  I think this misses the point, if someone doesn't understand open source etiquette then I would give them a friendly reply. Even if it was mentioned somewhere in the documentation, I understand that people can miss it. It's just that if someone speaks to me in that tone, regardless if this is an open source project or if I'm working customer service for a product, I'll still think they're acting like an ass. It's not a huge deal, people act like asses all the time, but why not just raise the issue in a friendly manner?
54mf 12y ago
You may take issue with Mr. Lodwick's tone, but he's not wrong. This gem is incomplete, and for a gem occupying the namespace "emoji", I think it's reasonable to expect the full, standard set of emoji. Passing the buck to another open source library is irresponsible and, frankly, lazy. Perhaps the maintainer should burn out, and let someone take over the gem who'll commit to feature-completeness.
- vinceguidry 12y ago
  The problem with this line of thought is that the number of serious contributors to FOSS is very small, the number of projects that need maintenance is large, it's not realistic to expect that someone will come in and maintain it if you step away, particularly for a small, limited-scope project like an emoji library. The difference is not between an incomplete gem and a complete gem, it's between an incomplete gem that's still being maintained, and an incomplete gem that's not being maintained.
- mhluongo 12y ago
  Have you ever maintained a reasonably popular OSS project?
- patio11 12y ago
  I'm really trying to avoid saying "Pull requests welcome" but it is darn tempting. Full disclosure: I'd consider "the maintainer" -- a gentleman named Steve -- an Internet buddy of mine. He is a real person, just like you. When he's not doing excessive amounts of free work for for-profit corporations, he enjoys philosophy and Netrunner. (Edit: Steve has contributed code and a lot of non-code scutwork to dozens of projects in the Ruby/Rails ecosystem, including -- off the top of my head -- Rails, half of why's body of work, Shoes (a pedagogy project), and, oh yeah, the emoji gem.) You appear to have the notion that Steve owes you quite a bit of work regarding publishing knock-off versions of Japanese cell phone character sets. This is an interesting entitlement to have, not because it is unique -- no, the OSS community includes lots and lots of people with it -- but because you've chosen to throw down the gauntlet over approximately the most trivial problem space ever addressed by an OSS project and it is one you don't even use. And for the sin of not making it easy enough to consume the free solution to that problem space (which is -- for bonus irony points -- because Steve actually was a conscientious OSS developer and went the extra mile to avoid infringing on the copyright law that OSS is vitally dependent on), you're wishing ill on him. You can, should you choose, publish a competing emoji gem. It will be whole keystrokes away from Steve's. Should you achieve success with it, the Google gods will even look upon you with favor and put it one notch higher than the Internet. Instructions for building and publishing gems are available on your local Internet. Godspeed.
DanBC 12y ago
Contrast with this where someone puts up a short bit of code on Github and is mocked for it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5106767#up_5106935 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5106767#up_5106935
- TillE 12y ago
  Wow. And what a lame apology, too. The difference is rudeness vs. cruelty. I think the latter is vastly worse.
  - aaronem 12y ago
    Well, OK, so Klabnik is an asshole, that's hardly news. It's unfortunately true that participating in OSS, as in any shared endeavor encompassing such a large subset of the species, requires dealing with assholes. The current contretemps (and corresponding HN thread) provides a valuable example, for the novice, of one particular suboptimal strategy, its ramifications, how to avoid it, and what might be worth doing instead. Of course, that's not to say I recommend novices study HN, especially for advice on how to behave -- God preserve them from such a fate! But, should a novice have happened in by mistake, perhaps he'll glean something useful from this thread in those few fleeting moments before the panic takes hold.
- Gigablah 12y ago
  I guess GitHub comments "make it hard not to accidentally be an asshole".
- MCRed 12y ago
  This is a much better example. Heather put up code, Klabnik was an asshole to her. He really doesn't deserve sympathy for whining when a user asks that his readme expose the lack of functionality of his project. That's actually a legitimate bug report, even if not delivered with sufficient kissing of Steve's ass. What Steven did to Heather, however, is pretty typical of him. It's the way he treated me in our one interaction online.
  - Xylakant 12y ago
xantronix 12y ago
Sounds a great deal like what I've gone through in my attempts to evangelize Tcl as of late. http://morderwerk.de/Spoken.png http://morderwerk.de/Spoken.png http://morderwerk.de/He%20really.png http://morderwerk.de/He%20really.png http://morderwerk.de/hates%20potheads.png http://morderwerk.de/hates%20potheads.png http://xan.pw/twitter/ http://xan.pw/twitter/
joeblau 12y ago
I maintain the gitignore.io repo with about 900 stars and thankfully the contributors aren't as snarky. I will say that the users of gitignore.io are probably more on the technical side, but it just seems like Jake is not familiar with the culture of FOSS. That being said, He's a 'customer' of your 'product' and even though his delivery isn't the best, there may be something you can take away from suggestion. When I'm evaluating a FOSS project, the first thing I try and do if I find something wrong is see if there is a way I can fix it and submit a PR. Then if it looks like it's out of my scope, I'll file a bug or look for another project. For gitignore.io, I often take product decisions from the community, but I like to have a discussion about what the best course of action is. I still have open issues in my backlog that I just haven't found an elegant solution to yet. Thankfully gitignore.io has a small enough feature scope that you can't do much with it, otherwise i'm sure the project would become overbearing very quickly.
steveklabnik 12y ago
Hey all. I'm on psudo-vacation, so I'm just going to leave this one comment and not read the rest of this thread or respond to anyone: 1. This was a few weeks ago, but I literally woke up, grabbed my phone, checked my email, and had this sitting in my inbox. Not exactly a great way to start your day. 2. Said person eventually apologized to me, and apparently didn't understand what open source meant or something? I don't hate him or anything. We all have bad days. I'm not perfect either. 3. The reason that this gem is missing those emoji is twofold: I cannot distribute copies of Apple Color Emoji due to licensing, as I mentioned in the issue. IANAL, but gemoji is infringing on Apple's IP. I'm not willing to do that. For more on this issue: http://words.steveklabnik.com/emoji-licensing http://words.steveklabnik.com/emoji-licensing Secondly, for some reason, Phantom Open Emoji doesn't have the full set. 4. If you're willing to infringe on Apple's IP, you can use your own images, and then it all just works. 5. It states in the second line of the README that this uses Phantom Open Emoji, contradicting what the author said in the issue. 6. I actually have issues open to integrate Twemoji and Emoji One, which I assume have the full set? Burnout on open source is real, and many, many days, I feel like it's all take and no give. If you run a company, please give your employees time to contribute back to the libraries you use. It scares me how much of the world runs on top of stuff that people basically do in their free time. It's not sustainable. (an addendum: thank $DIETY GitHub lets you lock issues nowadays, or I'm sure this would be filled with terrible .gifs)
- emojiofficer 12y ago
  In the US, rasterized font representations are not copyrightable, in contrast to vector representations. Emoji are very clearly a font, and Apple uses a rasterized format, so using Apple color emoji is fine in the US. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protection_of_typefaces http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protect...
  - bjt 12y ago
    That's a leap that's far from guaranteed by the cases summarized in your link. A court or the copyright office could just as easily say "just as the latest digital outline fonts have elements that can be protected as software, emoji have elements that can be protected as visual art."
krapp 12y ago
Wow. I'm honestly kind of happy right now that none of my projects are very popular....
freshflowers 12y ago
There are many, many activities, paid and unpaid, in which people get confronted with entitled a-holes on a regular basis. This is not unique to open source, or tech in general. This is a generic social issue.
olragon 12y ago
Remind me about this issue https://github.com/olragon/meteor-handsontable/issues/6 https://github.com/olragon/meteor-handsontable/issues/6
handzhiev 12y ago
I recently got a bad review of one of my free WP plugins. The same guy published negative reviews for 3-4 other plugins also in row in the next days. Apparently some people are just mentally disturbed. If you think the emoji issue report was rude, have some fun with these "reviews" https://wordpress.org/support/topic/everybody-thinks-they-know-how-to-make-a-job-board?replies=1 https://wordpress.org/support/topic/everybody-thinks-they-kn... https://wordpress.org/support/topic/bad-and-misleading?replies=1 https://wordpress.org/support/topic/bad-and-misleading?repli... https://wordpress.org/support/topic/bait-plugin-for-google?replies=2 https://wordpress.org/support/topic/bait-plugin-for-google?r... https://wordpress.org/support/topic/no-support-weak-plugin?replies=3 https://wordpress.org/support/topic/no-support-weak-plugin?r... (I made the mistake to answer him which resulted in another set of awesomeness). You just have to develop think skin. I'm still learning this slowly.
- AshFurrow 12y ago
  > I've yet to find any plugin (Free) that actually performs functions of a job board. That is some intense entitlement right there.
grigri 12y ago
I'm guilty of some severe cases of bike shedding bug reports back in my blunder years. Within my small model of reality I couldn't grasp why people wouldn't implement minor feature xy as it would have costed them seemingly only 10 minutes of their time. I appologize to anyone who had to deal with these.
skybrian 12y ago
Basic queuing theory says that if the rate at which issues are opened exceeds the rate at which they are closed (which is easy to do if the project is popular), the number of open issues will grow without bound. The result is that most bugs filed against any popular project can't be acted on. A good UI would help people understand this and set expectations accordingly. It's still very useful to have a database of known limitations and workarounds.
mamcx 12y ago
AKA: Tech Support Customers Solution: http://www.despair.com/apathy.html http://www.despair.com/apathy.html --- In commercial software tech support is probably the biggest draw of energy, but is harder to ignore them than in volunteer-based efforts (like open source, tech forums, blogs, etc).
code_duck 12y ago
I don't find the opening post to be rude. Jake Lodwick simply states that he's wasted a lot of time tracking down a known limitation that should have been listed in the docs, and that he feels Labnik could try a bit harder to avoid wasting other people's time. Probably Jake was frustrated there. It's not something I'd consider worth posting, but he was hardly abusive. Then, Labnik's post is pointlessly emotional and irrelevant, making a big deal out of a simple complaint. I feel like working with people like him would be more likely to make me burn out on open source. The author is acting dramatic and overreacting to a relatively mild comment.
mbesto 12y ago
FWIW - the guy in question (Lake Jodwick) did apologize for his behavior: https://twitter.com/jakelodwick/status/533777782484897792 https://twitter.com/jakelodwick/status/533777782484897792

243 points by clukic 12y ago

I'm not sure I understand, what is there to see in this link? Is there some underlying message to all this? Oh well, the issue was handled poorly or maybe the guy just went too far with this accusations, so what? How'd this get to the front page?:O

acomjean 12y ago
I think it's the entitled aspect of some open source users this is demonstrating. They expect everything to be the way they want it. they want all opensourced stuff to be polished, supported and free, without wanting to help out or chiping in.
- thanksalot 12y ago
  >they want all opensourced stuff to be polished That would be nice though. Why would you release something to the public and put your name on it if it's lazily done?
  - acomjean 12y ago
    This would be ideal, but in my experience evaluating some open source libraries, they were clearly works in progress or abandoned. I think people had good intentions when putting the stuff out there. Maybe because github is free for public open source, stuff gets put out there before its polished?
  - scarygliders 12y ago
    Isn't the whole point of Open Sourcing your stuff, is so that others can contribute to it if they so desire? Whether or not something is "lazily done" is besides the point. The point is - they produced _something_, and the consumer did not. If you see something which you think could be done in a better way, wouldn't a better use of your time be spent issuing a pull request with your suggested improvement, rather than whining that "it was lazily done" ?
  - b0ti 12y ago
    > Why would you release something to the public and put your name on it if it's lazily done? No software is perfect. It has either no features in it or has bugs. The assholes will either demand to get the missing features added or the bugs fixed.
- anon1385 12y ago
  On the other hand, people use open source to market themselves to promote their talks, books and consultancy gigs. You have to accept the negative sides of that as well. People will start to question the motivations of your contributions. People will be annoyed when the code you promoted has faults in it. Once you are doing things for commercial gain then people's attitudes towards you will shift. That seems inevitable.
- Iftheshoefits 12y ago
  Your comment and (as of this comment, anyway) the thread of replies is one reason why I think using a person's opensource contributions as part of an evaluation of their suitability for employment is a bit ridiculous. There is a whole range of completely arbitrary and subjective "measures" around such contributions, and they end up being no better filters than any of the other (flawed) filters people use to evaluate such things these days. It may have held (marginally greater) value at some point, but at this point it is just another bullet point clueless HR managers and petty managers can stick next to the "alphabet soup" in their job descriptions.
  - wahnfrieden 12y ago
    This is overly cynical. It can be a meaningful positive indicator, and simply not a data point if a candidate lacks one.
    - Iftheshoefits 12y ago
      That's overly charitable. It can be a meaningful positive indicator, but only the same way that any other work experience can be. Compare that with the proliferation of requirements for experience in specific languages rather than for specific (but more general) engineering ability, and I think my cynical take isn't overly cynical at all.
nraynaud 12y ago
someone wanted to launch the hivemind against the bug reporter because he was not deferential enough. The irony being that the victim is a member of Ember.js who is bullying the rest of open source on twitter while touting how they are saving Africa from a Portland coffee shop.
- Aeolun 12y ago
  Not 'not deferential enough', bug reporter is a general asshat. Maintainer seemed well aware of that and replied in kind. It doesn't matter that the people you are bullying are bullies themselves, that doesn't make your bullying in any way ok.
kiallmacinnes 12y ago
I think this post is attempting to make the exact opposite point? The issue reporter is effectively ranting that the gem isn't good enough, and because it's called "emoji", he for whatever reasons feels entitled to this rant. I don't see anything wrong with the maintainers response..
scarygliders 12y ago
When the producers of open source programs, scripts, and utilities spend some of their time, intelligence, and thought on this planet to produce something useful and give that product of their effort away for free, it gets seriously disenheartening to have someone else make a dumb comment, or create an issue out of anger which is unjustified due to the consumer of that product not having read either the documentation, or the source code they decided to use. Other ways of pissing us off are asking a question which is obviously facepalm-inducingly stupid due to again not having read the documentation/code, or trying to use the product whilst simulataneously not having the first clue on what they're doing (which could be because they're new at coding or handling computer systems in general). When a producer of Free Stuff gets the kind of bullcrap described above, it wears them down over time. I have encountered this with my stuff - especially in comments on my blog. I do try to answer questions and be as helpful as possible, but there are some people out there who you just know can't be bothered to do some basic research, or read your helpful instructions, or are basically just too lazy to learn and only want to consume without thinking. This is what wears people down. It's not just one crappy issue being raised on your stuff in Github, it's the accumulation of this cruft over time - like hundreds of straws piling up on your camel's back - eventually it'll break.
- Sorgam 12y ago
  Keep in mind that every alternative free library to do something adds cost to the task of selecting a library. Some open source projects (not suggesting any specifically) actually do make life worse for people because they spend time studying it only to find it's not useful.
  - scarygliders 12y ago
    In my book, spending the time to see whether something is useful (or works) or not, is called "due diligence". I'm also of the opinion that the time spent raking through libraries that look useful to you to find out if they really are useful to you, more than offsets time you'll spend looking for bugs in your program which were caused by using something which turned out to not do what you thought it did.
- 12y ago
maxsilver 12y ago
It's a silly and petty jab at the maintainer of a small open source project. Fighting with people on these "complaints masked as a fake issue" is one reason people sometimes burn out on maintaining open source projects. - - For a similar scenario: Imagine if some tiny indie band put up a song or two on their own website for free. Now imagine if the top response said "You songs aren't as good as Taylor Swift's songs. You should disclose that your band isn't Taylor Swift, so I don't waste my time listening to this, and you should take these songs down and replace them with pirated copies of Taylor Swift songs, because I like them better" That's effectively what's happening on this issue, in open-source-code form.
- nraynaud 12y ago
  He didn't pick on the underdog, don't give this false impression. The bug report was certainly not nice, but it was not answered by an unknown anonymous grunt of the open source movement, we're talking 15k followers on twitter.
Napoleon1963 12y ago
Maybe it's because it involves Steve Klabnik, who is a prominent commenter here? While the tone of the report may not have been very polite, it is understandable why the reporter was disappointed. I think it's perfectly reasonable for a user to ask that a library's deficiencies be made obvious in some way, regardless of why they exist. The readme file is a good place for this. I don't think that Steve handled it very well at all, though. Calling the report creator an "ass" is uncalled for. Creating unnecessary drama over a perfectly reasonable request is uncalled for. Closing the bug without adding a line or two to the readme file addressing this deficiency is uncalled for. Preventing further discussion is uncalled for.
- scarygliders 12y ago
  Perhaps if the issue was raised as a pull request with the desired changes to the Readme, rather than just raising the issue as a general whine. The whine itself stinks of someone not having gone through the source to see if the product really does what they want it to do. It reeks of "hey this looks like what I want YOINK! " , implementing it in their code, and discovering afterwards that some Things are missing. Then getting pissed off at the producer of the product, rather than at themselves for their oversight/laziness.
  - cpncrunch 12y ago
    I shouldn't have to look through the source code to see if a library does what I want it to do.
    - carols10cents 12y ago
      That is absolutely what you have to do with open source. If you aren't willing to do that, don't use OSS.
      - cpncrunch 12y ago
        I've been using open source for 20 years and I don't think I've ever had to do that. Sometimes I have to fix bugs in a library or ditch it because it's a piece of crap. However you generally shouldn't have to read the source code to see what it actually does. If so, that's just laziness on the part of the author (and it's wasting everyone's time).
grokys 12y ago
I think the "Public Contributions" section of the two users says it all: https://github.com/jakelodwick https://github.com/jakelodwick https://github.com/steveklabnik https://github.com/steveklabnik

_ZeD_ 12y ago

By the way... what is the raison d'etre of this gem? I just don't get why anyone think it's a good idea to replace a character with an image. It's like to replace all "e" characters in this comment with a .png congaing a fancy custom "e"...

slapresta 12y ago
> It's like to replace all "e" characters in this comment with a .png congaing a fancy custom "e"... So, uh, like Web Fonts, then?
- _ZeD_ 12y ago
  you mean "in a totally different way", do you? you are comparing a gem replacing, in a string with html content, a text fragment with an '<img />' tag, with a way to load and apply custom font from a remote location to a web page text region. While, closing one eye, the effect of the two solution are similar, the solutions are totally different from the technological point of view, from the abstraction layer when they are applied to the practical implications (try to do a simple cut-n-paste from the browser to a text editor, for example)
  - slapresta 12y ago
    I know they're technically different; what I wanted to point out is that it's not such a far-fetched idea.
yuchi 12y ago
Mostly because a lot of browsers do not support emojis at all, and they’ve become pretty ubiquitous.
- NhanH 12y ago
  They're a mean to be expressive via text ... and I really hate the fact that apps are replacing the text with the image. I can always recognize what a string of emoji is supposed to be (there will be obscure one, but then that's entirely dependent on who you're communicating with). Replacing the emoji with the image means that I now have to decipher the image. Not to mention that everyone does it differently. For example, ":))" and "=))" is not the same, and it's really hard to guess which one is which in most of the apps. Yes, I know this whole comment is silly...

67726e 12y ago

The reason I stopped being the maintainer on a popular jQuery library was the wave after wave of incompetent folks asking me to do their work for them. I don't mean mere API questions, or asking things around how the plugin works or does what it does. These were entire "Integrate this for me" questions. People unwilling to do the bare minimum of work. No matter how many examples or how much documentation, these folks flat out wouldn't do their own work. Beyond that, most of these weren't being asked by some 12-year old learning to code, these people would link to their commercial site and expect me to "Give them teh codez" In retrospect, I should have taken the hard-line approach and directed everyone to StackOverflow and limit GitHub to an issue tracker. When it came to assholes making asshole comments and requests, I had no problem telling them to stick their overbearing request where the sun doesn't shine. Of course those folks were few and far in between.

tomjen3 12y ago
If you ever want to go back in OSS development, include a disclaimer that you are more than willing to integrate it into their site, at your usual rate of $X00 dollars per hour, with a minimum of $Y hours. The worst that might happen is that somebody takes you up on that.
- snorkel 12y ago
  Agree. The way to answer"do my work for me" is "Thank you for inquiring about Commercial Support offerings ...."
- izacus 12y ago
  That does not really help - people he's talking about simply do not read and do not care about what you did. Going through bunch of soul-sucking emails/messages/issues every day, even if you do not answer, is a huge demotivator for any public development work :/
  - e40 12y ago
    Why can they simply be ignored? I run a support department (for a closed source product) and we do this all the time.

fjarlq 12y ago

The user who filed that bug is Jake Lodwick, co-founder of Vimeo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jake_Lodwick https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jake_Lodwick

xtrumanx 12y ago
Anyone else feel uncomfortable by the above comment.
- steinnes 12y ago
  Not really, I think both guys in the issue discussion are obviously very smart, and I can identify with their respective frustrations. I do think Jake's comments are a little harsh as the README refers to Phantom Open Emoji in the 2nd paragraph -- however if I had just spent hours debugging something like this, making an annoyed issue on GitHub could be the outcome.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- WorldWideWayne 12y ago
  Why should they? Jake already revealed his full name over at Github.
  - xtrumanx 12y ago
    If Reddit has taught me anything it's that linking information about someone people may dislike sometimes leads to harassment. Hopefully the HN crowd is mature enough to engage in such tactics but I have a very low faith in any internet community in general.
    - wismer 12y ago
      At least HN is a notch above GamerGate
    - 12y ago

nox_ 12y ago

Replying with an attack and closing comments is definitely something a douchebag would do. Free or opensource doesn't mean you get to be irresponsible about what you release or maintain, if your project has some caveats they should be listed explicitly.

carols10cents 12y ago
Actually, it does-- have you ever even READ the MIT license? THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

textphone 12y ago

Same reason people burn out on Hacker News. Independent developer consultants, as a demographic, significantly skews towards a larger-than-average number of people who were never surrounded by a good professional office culture. Many never learned the benefits or skills of writing in ways that won't be interpreted as mean. In fact, many pride themselves in trying to be the opposite of a professional behaving office person. Toxic culture, loves to point out the tiniest flaws in everyone else's work and don't care or realize that doing so is hurting others. Case in point, Hacker News was a much happier place that was more receptive to positively responding to people sharing their work, back when it was Startup News. Inviting in all kinds of hackers, ended up bringing in the worst of the worst segment of the demographic. I love doing developer consulting, I know many awesome consultants who behave great, but the average behavior of the demographic as a whole is is really bad.

x1024 12y ago
Counterpoint: "Corporate culture" environments where everyone is at "Stepford Wives" level of jollyness rarely get much done.
- textphone 12y ago
  Who do you really think gets more done: The people who show up to whine and criticize, or the people who hold back the whining to silently go and make their own improved solution instead? Consider that people who wine, seem to outnumber the people who do by at least 1000 to 1, and you'll have my answer for who I believe to be contributing more to getting things done.
  - x1024 12y ago
    So... you are saying that if a whiner contributes at least 1/1000th as much as a normal person, the whiner is better for humanity? I'm not sure I follow...
  - protonfish 12y ago
    There is no contest: it is the environment where frequent, uncensored criticism is tolerated or even encouraged. That guy who is silently working on their own solution? Without listening to feedback from his peers (or, more likely, his betters) his work is probably junk that nobody wants or worse - something that will cause more problems than it solves. Before I worked in software I noticed companies would have two cultures. A "shop" culture where workers can wear casual clothes, swear, kick stuff, and at the end of the day, get things working, and the "front office" that focused on sales. You never knew if a client was on the phone or in the office so workers dressed well and any negative speech was strictly forbidden. Because programmers work at a desk, they are shoehorned into front office culture. This has probably done more harm to the productivity of software projects than any other factor. Just this year I watched a small software project (one that a small team of competent developers, QA, and a BA could have completed in several weeks) waste millions of dollars (some say hundreds of millions - the real figure (in the true spirit of front office culture) would be "rude" to tell) before being cancelled. I saw this train wreck coming a mile away and documented the issues and forwarded them to my supervisor but it made no difference. In defense of the company I work for, at least they didn't fire me. It is pure front office culture to blame the whistle blowers for failure. And don't even start with "Oh, you just need to say it in the nicest, politest manner!" There is no way to tell somebody they are wrong and have to change in a "nice" way. Your organization either can focus on the quality of the end product and encourage criticism or focus on appearance and censor it. But if you choose the latter, unless your project is a con, it is doomed from the start.

gorhill 12y ago

Regardless of the specifics of this case, I do feel like there is such a thing as "burning out on open source", a topic which is of interest to me at this point. I would like to read other people insights about this, this would probably help me better at setting proper boundaries in my own projects. I found myself often struggling to deal with this kind of issue: How to be sure whether you are being used (possibly not even on purpose), or whether the issue raised really benefit the whole project? On one hand we don't want to be used, on the other hand, we don't want to chill contributions of good ideas. It can be tough sometimes to assess properly (keeping in mind we all have bad days on top of all this).

b0ti 12y ago
I had a similar "open source burnout" recently. Since you asked for it, there is a blog post I wrote which might be of interest: http://nxlog-ce.sourceforge.net/why-the-gpl-does-not-work http://nxlog-ce.sourceforge.net/why-the-gpl-does-not-work
- gorhill 12y ago
  I don't relate to your blog post. I am definitely not second guessing my use of GPL. That is another topic than the one here as far as I am concerned.

benihana 12y ago

A pull request where two guys acted like jackasses towards each other, and where we instinctively try to pick sides based on our past experiences and beliefs. I think really thinking on why I'm siding with one person almost immediately despite not having much context in this is really revealing and maybe not a little unpleasant.

yownie 12y ago
so much this ++
nailer 12y ago
Actually while I posted earlier about the 'show me the codes' people, this guy isn't really one of them and I might have felt bad for implying it was. It might be reasonable for an emoji library to say 'ALPHA: missing a few characters' to stop people from trying to debug non-existent rendering problems - but he puts this in a very aggressive manner. As you said, they're both wrong (and right) in their own ways.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- michaelhoffman 12y ago
  Almost all countries are signatories of the Berne Convention, meaning that works are under copyright protection automatically, without requiring copyright notices. Similarly, no license mentioned means that you only have the rights given to you by law (such as fair use or fair dealing).
sylvinus 12y ago
One of the guys wrote something and published it as open source. The other got to use it for free but still complains with an inappropriate tone. Hard not to side with the first one by default.
- 54mf 12y ago
  Offering incomplete software as open source doesn't make it any less incomplete. Are we giving out blue ribbons for participation now?

underachieve 12y ago

tschellenbach 12y ago

Yes it's hard at times, I especially have trouble maintaining Django-Facebook as both of those dependencies change so freakingly fast. Let me know if you want to help out :) https://github.com/tschellenbach/Django-facebook https://github.com/tschellenbach/Django-facebook

underachieve 12y ago

The point I don't get is why he complains about that gem when he obviously found an alternative that better suited his needs. Why for heaven's sake not just use this but raise an issue. If we all started raising issues for for something beeing "not what I was looking for" github would be bursting at the seams. Is he really moping about the fact that the readme does not provide a full list of ALL emojis and whether they are supported? And why is a emoji gem required to work with "massage" and "satellite"?

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

frontsideair 12y ago

Why can't everyone be nice to each other? </naive>

g534345 12y ago

I'm maintaining a small open source mobile app. The app is fairly popular and well liked. However, there are also a lot of people who just send comments to the app store that the app is useless without feature x or is total crap if I don't change something. Nowadays, I get anxiety when I just think that I should go to the app store and read the latest comments. I understand that open source is about community and things should be made together. However, I haven't really got any contributions except few language translations. I'm getting tired of the app and sadly it will be the last open source software I'll release under my own name. From now on, I'll just dump the source to somewhere and forget about it. Or keep the source closed. Writing software, even open source software, should be fun. It shouldn't mean that one person writes everything and others complain that it isn't enough.

mahouse 12y ago
If you get anxiety when you to have read what others think about your app, your problems are somewhere else.. mostly taking into account that you're uploading it to the app store, a place where almost nobody knows what open source is and they don't even care.
xioxox 12y ago
The app store problem is also there in various review sites. For instance, my plotting app gets quite a few satisfied users, albeit very few external contributions, but it get some extremely lousy reviews from people who've run it for two minutes and not read the documentation, particularly on Mac websites, e.g. https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/21029/veusz https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/21029/veusz (a site where I didn't even upload it).

332451b 12y ago

This is the same strategy I've used in open source projects. Handling the report is annoying, but then having to go spend time fixing the issue to help someone who is being an ass is soul draining. And it only encourages them and other people to be an ass to get what they want. So I call them out and close or delete the issue, and if they get frustrated because of that, great! This doesn't mean I won't fix the issue eventually, just on my own terms without giving that person the satisfaction. Makes me feel a lot better.

rcfox 12y ago

> I like your gem otherwise, but it's called "emoji", implying that it's the Ruby library for handling those characters. That's not the first time I've encountered this assumption. I can believe that it makes sense, if you're will to willing to play the part of the layman user: "I want emojis, so I'll just do: gem install emoji" However, I don't think it's too unreasonable for people with some basic level of experience to understand that there's no central authority granting library names. If it were a core library that came with the interpreter, sure, it's fair to expect that that is the library you're supposed to use. When you get into community-sourced libraries, names are just granted on a first-come, first-served basis for whatever service is hosting them.

trvz 12y ago
> When you get into community-sourced libraries, names are just granted on a first-come, first-served basis for whatever service is hosting them. Maybe they shouldn't be. I dislike Apache being called httpd in yum, as compared to apache2 in apt. I can see how a package called markdown wouldn't be a port of the original, but CommonMark, and that would be misleading, too. If a package managing system doesn't care, it loses some pride in my eye.
leoc 12y ago
The lack of a central authority for names hardly absolve individual library creators/maintainers of the responsibility to choose appropriate names; closer to the opposite, surely.

codebeaker 12y ago

Maintainer of Capistrano here, I've been close to FOSS burnout a couple of times, and more often than I would like people catch the sharp end of my tongue. I can count on one hand how many issues have been opened with a corresponding PR, and from those, barely any ever come with tests, or acknowledge the stuff in the CONTRIBUTING file (Github includes a "Before opening this issue, check this project's guidelines). Fortunately there are couple of people who consistently tackle issues that the lazy people have opened, and submit super high quality PRs with unit and functional tests, documentation and entries in the CHANGELOG. These people are the main reason that I still work on FOSS. My solution was to make heavy use of labels at GH, the "needs more info" and "feature request" ones are obnoxious colours. Second to that, I bought a TextExpander licence, and setup a bunch of macros `notanissue` which expands to: > Closing because I’m not sure this is an issue, if you are convinced that this is really a bug, please feel free to re-open the issue and add more information (your versions (Ruby, Cap, etc), your Capfile, your logs, and relevant sections out of your Gemfile) > Otherwise support is done via the mailing list (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/capistrano https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/capistrano) or at StackOverflow (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/capistrano http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/capistrano) with questions tagged `capistrano`. And a number of others 'contrib' for contribution guidelines when a PR is in conflict with them, etc. It's helped lighten the load a lot, and now tend to invest heavily in grooming the issue list, and keeping things neat and tidy at GH. I dare guess, when I'm awake 90% of the issues are classified, or closed within 5 minutes of being opened, this has helped a lot with the feeling of pressure and constant nagging with which I've previously suffered. Of course, maintaining a large project is a burden, but it comes with career and profile benefits.

weaksauce 12y ago
Thanks for your hard work on the project! You have improved the lives of many working programmers. What are you looking for for the future of Capistrano? The problem and major benefit to github is how easy it is to contribute. Sometimes it's like a high maintenance low paying customer vs. a high paying customer that treats you like a professional and gets out of your way I guess.
- 12y ago

billsix 12y ago

Yet he mocked the existence of a open source project not that long ago https://harthur.wordpress.com/2013/01/24/771/ https://harthur.wordpress.com/2013/01/24/771/

fnordfnordfnord 12y ago
I remember this controversy. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5106767 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5106767 Edit: See also: steveklabnik's apology. http://blog.steveklabnik.com/posts/2013-01-23-node http://blog.steveklabnik.com/posts/2013-01-23-node

deleted 12y ago

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deleted 12y ago

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jonathanwallace 12y ago

Pertinent follow-up. Jake was naive about open source norms. See twitter conversations: https://twitter.com/jonathanwallace/status/533680518009614336 https://twitter.com/jonathanwallace/status/53368051800961433... https://twitter.com/jonathanwallace/status/533679332590628864 https://twitter.com/jonathanwallace/status/53367933259062886...

dmpk2k 12y ago
Maybe naive, but also impolite. Opening an issue with a passive-aggressive tone isn't likely to be productive.
- aaronem 12y ago
  That's really the problem here. Ignorance is excusable, especially in someone who hasn't got a lot of experience yet. Rude ignorance is never so, especially around a library on Github where, if it's really that big a damn deal to you, you can always just fork, edit a big "THIS IS NOT APPLE COLOR EMOJI" note into the readme, open a PR, and see what happens.
332451b 12y ago
I think this misses the point, if someone doesn't understand open source etiquette then I would give them a friendly reply. Even if it was mentioned somewhere in the documentation, I understand that people can miss it. It's just that if someone speaks to me in that tone, regardless if this is an open source project or if I'm working customer service for a product, I'll still think they're acting like an ass. It's not a huge deal, people act like asses all the time, but why not just raise the issue in a friendly manner?

54mf 12y ago

You may take issue with Mr. Lodwick's tone, but he's not wrong. This gem is incomplete, and for a gem occupying the namespace "emoji", I think it's reasonable to expect the full, standard set of emoji. Passing the buck to another open source library is irresponsible and, frankly, lazy. Perhaps the maintainer should burn out, and let someone take over the gem who'll commit to feature-completeness.

vinceguidry 12y ago
The problem with this line of thought is that the number of serious contributors to FOSS is very small, the number of projects that need maintenance is large, it's not realistic to expect that someone will come in and maintain it if you step away, particularly for a small, limited-scope project like an emoji library. The difference is not between an incomplete gem and a complete gem, it's between an incomplete gem that's still being maintained, and an incomplete gem that's not being maintained.
mhluongo 12y ago
Have you ever maintained a reasonably popular OSS project?
patio11 12y ago
I'm really trying to avoid saying "Pull requests welcome" but it is darn tempting. Full disclosure: I'd consider "the maintainer" -- a gentleman named Steve -- an Internet buddy of mine. He is a real person, just like you. When he's not doing excessive amounts of free work for for-profit corporations, he enjoys philosophy and Netrunner. (Edit: Steve has contributed code and a lot of non-code scutwork to dozens of projects in the Ruby/Rails ecosystem, including -- off the top of my head -- Rails, half of why's body of work, Shoes (a pedagogy project), and, oh yeah, the emoji gem.) You appear to have the notion that Steve owes you quite a bit of work regarding publishing knock-off versions of Japanese cell phone character sets. This is an interesting entitlement to have, not because it is unique -- no, the OSS community includes lots and lots of people with it -- but because you've chosen to throw down the gauntlet over approximately the most trivial problem space ever addressed by an OSS project and it is one you don't even use. And for the sin of not making it easy enough to consume the free solution to that problem space (which is -- for bonus irony points -- because Steve actually was a conscientious OSS developer and went the extra mile to avoid infringing on the copyright law that OSS is vitally dependent on), you're wishing ill on him. You can, should you choose, publish a competing emoji gem. It will be whole keystrokes away from Steve's. Should you achieve success with it, the Google gods will even look upon you with favor and put it one notch higher than the Internet. Instructions for building and publishing gems are available on your local Internet. Godspeed.

DanBC 12y ago

Contrast with this where someone puts up a short bit of code on Github and is mocked for it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5106767#up_5106935 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5106767#up_5106935

TillE 12y ago
Wow. And what a lame apology, too. The difference is rudeness vs. cruelty. I think the latter is vastly worse.
- aaronem 12y ago
  Well, OK, so Klabnik is an asshole, that's hardly news. It's unfortunately true that participating in OSS, as in any shared endeavor encompassing such a large subset of the species, requires dealing with assholes. The current contretemps (and corresponding HN thread) provides a valuable example, for the novice, of one particular suboptimal strategy, its ramifications, how to avoid it, and what might be worth doing instead. Of course, that's not to say I recommend novices study HN, especially for advice on how to behave -- God preserve them from such a fate! But, should a novice have happened in by mistake, perhaps he'll glean something useful from this thread in those few fleeting moments before the panic takes hold.
Gigablah 12y ago
I guess GitHub comments "make it hard not to accidentally be an asshole".
MCRed 12y ago
This is a much better example. Heather put up code, Klabnik was an asshole to her. He really doesn't deserve sympathy for whining when a user asks that his readme expose the lack of functionality of his project. That's actually a legitimate bug report, even if not delivered with sufficient kissing of Steve's ass. What Steven did to Heather, however, is pretty typical of him. It's the way he treated me in our one interaction online.
- Xylakant 12y ago

xantronix 12y ago

Sounds a great deal like what I've gone through in my attempts to evangelize Tcl as of late. http://morderwerk.de/Spoken.png http://morderwerk.de/Spoken.png http://morderwerk.de/He%20really.png http://morderwerk.de/He%20really.png http://morderwerk.de/hates%20potheads.png http://morderwerk.de/hates%20potheads.png http://xan.pw/twitter/ http://xan.pw/twitter/

joeblau 12y ago

I maintain the gitignore.io repo with about 900 stars and thankfully the contributors aren't as snarky. I will say that the users of gitignore.io are probably more on the technical side, but it just seems like Jake is not familiar with the culture of FOSS. That being said, He's a 'customer' of your 'product' and even though his delivery isn't the best, there may be something you can take away from suggestion. When I'm evaluating a FOSS project, the first thing I try and do if I find something wrong is see if there is a way I can fix it and submit a PR. Then if it looks like it's out of my scope, I'll file a bug or look for another project. For gitignore.io, I often take product decisions from the community, but I like to have a discussion about what the best course of action is. I still have open issues in my backlog that I just haven't found an elegant solution to yet. Thankfully gitignore.io has a small enough feature scope that you can't do much with it, otherwise i'm sure the project would become overbearing very quickly.

steveklabnik 12y ago

Hey all. I'm on psudo-vacation, so I'm just going to leave this one comment and not read the rest of this thread or respond to anyone: 1. This was a few weeks ago, but I literally woke up, grabbed my phone, checked my email, and had this sitting in my inbox. Not exactly a great way to start your day. 2. Said person eventually apologized to me, and apparently didn't understand what open source meant or something? I don't hate him or anything. We all have bad days. I'm not perfect either. 3. The reason that this gem is missing those emoji is twofold: I cannot distribute copies of Apple Color Emoji due to licensing, as I mentioned in the issue. IANAL, but gemoji is infringing on Apple's IP. I'm not willing to do that. For more on this issue: http://words.steveklabnik.com/emoji-licensing http://words.steveklabnik.com/emoji-licensing Secondly, for some reason, Phantom Open Emoji doesn't have the full set. 4. If you're willing to infringe on Apple's IP, you can use your own images, and then it all just works. 5. It states in the second line of the README that this uses Phantom Open Emoji, contradicting what the author said in the issue. 6. I actually have issues open to integrate Twemoji and Emoji One, which I assume have the full set? Burnout on open source is real, and many, many days, I feel like it's all take and no give. If you run a company, please give your employees time to contribute back to the libraries you use. It scares me how much of the world runs on top of stuff that people basically do in their free time. It's not sustainable. (an addendum: thank $DIETY GitHub lets you lock issues nowadays, or I'm sure this would be filled with terrible .gifs)

emojiofficer 12y ago
In the US, rasterized font representations are not copyrightable, in contrast to vector representations. Emoji are very clearly a font, and Apple uses a rasterized format, so using Apple color emoji is fine in the US. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protection_of_typefaces http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protect...
- bjt 12y ago
  That's a leap that's far from guaranteed by the cases summarized in your link. A court or the copyright office could just as easily say "just as the latest digital outline fonts have elements that can be protected as software, emoji have elements that can be protected as visual art."

krapp 12y ago

Wow. I'm honestly kind of happy right now that none of my projects are very popular....

freshflowers 12y ago

There are many, many activities, paid and unpaid, in which people get confronted with entitled a-holes on a regular basis. This is not unique to open source, or tech in general. This is a generic social issue.

olragon 12y ago

Remind me about this issue https://github.com/olragon/meteor-handsontable/issues/6 https://github.com/olragon/meteor-handsontable/issues/6

handzhiev 12y ago

I recently got a bad review of one of my free WP plugins. The same guy published negative reviews for 3-4 other plugins also in row in the next days. Apparently some people are just mentally disturbed. If you think the emoji issue report was rude, have some fun with these "reviews" https://wordpress.org/support/topic/everybody-thinks-they-know-how-to-make-a-job-board?replies=1 https://wordpress.org/support/topic/everybody-thinks-they-kn... https://wordpress.org/support/topic/bad-and-misleading?replies=1 https://wordpress.org/support/topic/bad-and-misleading?repli... https://wordpress.org/support/topic/bait-plugin-for-google?replies=2 https://wordpress.org/support/topic/bait-plugin-for-google?r... https://wordpress.org/support/topic/no-support-weak-plugin?replies=3 https://wordpress.org/support/topic/no-support-weak-plugin?r... (I made the mistake to answer him which resulted in another set of awesomeness). You just have to develop think skin. I'm still learning this slowly.

AshFurrow 12y ago
> I've yet to find any plugin (Free) that actually performs functions of a job board. That is some intense entitlement right there.

grigri 12y ago

I'm guilty of some severe cases of bike shedding bug reports back in my blunder years. Within my small model of reality I couldn't grasp why people wouldn't implement minor feature xy as it would have costed them seemingly only 10 minutes of their time. I appologize to anyone who had to deal with these.

skybrian 12y ago

Basic queuing theory says that if the rate at which issues are opened exceeds the rate at which they are closed (which is easy to do if the project is popular), the number of open issues will grow without bound. The result is that most bugs filed against any popular project can't be acted on. A good UI would help people understand this and set expectations accordingly. It's still very useful to have a database of known limitations and workarounds.

mamcx 12y ago

AKA: Tech Support Customers Solution: http://www.despair.com/apathy.html http://www.despair.com/apathy.html --- In commercial software tech support is probably the biggest draw of energy, but is harder to ignore them than in volunteer-based efforts (like open source, tech forums, blogs, etc).

code_duck 12y ago

I don't find the opening post to be rude. Jake Lodwick simply states that he's wasted a lot of time tracking down a known limitation that should have been listed in the docs, and that he feels Labnik could try a bit harder to avoid wasting other people's time. Probably Jake was frustrated there. It's not something I'd consider worth posting, but he was hardly abusive. Then, Labnik's post is pointlessly emotional and irrelevant, making a big deal out of a simple complaint. I feel like working with people like him would be more likely to make me burn out on open source. The author is acting dramatic and overreacting to a relatively mild comment.

mbesto 12y ago

FWIW - the guy in question (Lake Jodwick) did apologize for his behavior: https://twitter.com/jakelodwick/status/533777782484897792 https://twitter.com/jakelodwick/status/533777782484897792