As the dev of a macOS app that breaks all the time because of external hardware, the tone of the article hits close to home. (I’m talking about https://lunar.fyi/ whose brightness control commands can be blocked by USB-C hubs, “smart” monitors, too long cables etc.)
I had to disable public GitHub issues on the app repo [1] because people seemed to fuel each other with spiteful comments and “why can’t you just!!” sentences.
The contact form still attracts many such “entitled” people and it hurts to wake up to such messages, but at least I can choose to ignore those if I can’t bring anything to the discussion. There’s no peer pressure.
These people are expecting too much from a handful of developers who are sharing a lot of free work and time that could have been spent better than hunting new IDs in URLs and updating regular expressions.
I believe that FOSS maintainers should jump to the public showroom of providing open source software with a much stronger mentality of quoting and adhering to the license more frequently. That solves a lot of the user entitlement, in my experience. Just like a proprietary software provider would first try to be helpful but otherwise point to some rules that limit their responsibility.
Paraphrasing most if not all of the open source licences, the software is provided with no guarantee, not even with a promise that it will be fit for any purpose. Most users don't even think of the possibility that, given how the source code is offered, private contractors can be hired to make whichever modifications are deemed useful by anyone. I like to remind that to people who get too insistent.
That's basically a less lazy reply form of "just fork it", but it tends to draw the line pretty well. Just quote the license, folks. Otherwise, people usually don't bother to read it.
To be honest I sometimes (rarely) do get heartfelt messages like these, and it’s what still keeps me working on apps. Sure, it feels ok to sell a bunch of licenses and get a few thousand dollars at the end of the month, but it feels so much better to see your hard work appreciated and people improving their lives with it.
I had to disable public GitHub issues on the app repo [1] because people seemed to fuel each other with spiteful comments and “why can’t you just!!” sentences.
The contact form still attracts many such “entitled” people and it hurts to wake up to such messages, but at least I can choose to ignore those if I can’t bring anything to the discussion. There’s no peer pressure.
These people are expecting too much from a handful of developers who are sharing a lot of free work and time that could have been spent better than hunting new IDs in URLs and updating regular expressions.
[1] https://github.com/alin23/Lunar