Don't be that guy.

hperrin@lemmy.world to Open Source@lemmy.ml – 1789 points –

When you're talking to an open source dev, just remember that they are literally giving you their time for free, and they are people who don't like to be treated poorly.

Edit: Just to be clear, I don’t mean any ill will toward the guy. He’s frustrated and he’s just taking it out in the wrong venue at the wrong people, but that doesn’t mean he’s a bad person.

Edit 2: The reinstalling he’s talking about is NPM. So just running npm install. It’s because he tried removing the node_modules directory, which is a reasonable thing to do, but it means you need to reinstall the modules with that command.

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Open source developers: Why aren't more people using open source software software for everything. It's better.

Also open source developers: Oh it broke your computer, well that's your problem. You should have had a software engineering degree in order to vet the software yourself.

User goes back to closed source paid spyware.. ahem software.

Open source developers: Why aren't more people using open source software software for everything. It's better.

There's a difference between trying to find out what is wrong and being a cunt.

If this person had asked politely after quickly searching for answers, the developer's response would most likely be different and helpful

Absolutely. Should have clarifying that I'm not defending the attitude and abuse of developers. However driving non technical end users to insanity with ill thought through processes is also wrong. Such as expecting users to write bug reports when an automated tool should be being used. An unclear installation guide where 90% of user run into the same problem. etc.

Linus's (LTT) Linux challenge was the ultimate test of the open source community and they failed miserably. Blaming linus for bricking the system. Um hello, he never should have been incentivized to open the command line at all.

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It didn’t break his computer. In trying to fix it, he deleted his node_modules directory, and now he’s complaining that he has to run npm install and wait for it to finish.

So to be clear, it was his own action that caused him to have to reinstall everything.

The entitlement of the open source community can be astonishingly deaf. You tell users that open source is better, users try it and your response is, oh it's free software, you get what you pay for.

Pay who? If I donate do I get paid support? Almost any other paid product/service based off that project almost certainly won't be open source and probably subscription spyware. So your answer to use open source is don't use open source???

If this is your attitude on your repo then don't imply/demonstrate it as for production ready use. It a personal fun dev project not fit for mainstream use. Pick a side, you can't have both.

I actually offer consulting services for this library in particular, so yes, if you pay, you get paid support.

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