The terror of “users”
OK, maybe “users” is the wrong word. I should say, “leechers”.
What am I talking about? I am talking about this Slashdot article, in which people complain that fixing the bug in CVS is not good enough for them. Before you mark me down as one of those “l33t elitist bastards who don’t have about users and should die and burn in hell” (like many Slashdotters apparently do to OSS developers), read on.
I’m an open source developer. I’m also a student. Right now I’m 4 weeks aways from my exams. I just spent 3 hours studying Management & Organization, for which I have to read about 100 pages per week. Other subjects I have to study for the upcoming exams are Linear Algebra and Basic Computer Science Models. One of the reasons why I write open source software is because I enjoy programming. I usually try very hard to make my software as easy-to-use as possible, even to nontechnical end users. In fact, the past few months I have spent hundreds of hours writing documentation for non-technical end users - documentation which is full of colors and screenshots to make it as easy to read as possible. When users have a serious problem I usually try to help them as much as I can, provided that I’m not too tired or busy or anything like that. And I do all this while I have very few time because of my study, for free.
Am I someone who don’t care about users? Would I have spent all that trouble writing documentation and making my software as friendly as possible, if I don’t? According to the Slashdot article, I apparently am. It is apparently a sin to ask users to see whether they can reproduce a bug in the CVS version.* It isn’t good enough for them to ask them to help me out a little bit. No, the leechers expect me to do all the hard work for them - to sacrifice my free time, for free. And apparently I’m a miserably failure if I don’t do exactly as they demand.
* Now, if you say that nontechnical users don’t know how to use CVS - that’s an entirely different issue (I spent lots of time writing user-friendly SVN instructions for non-technical users, but that’s besides the point). But what I’m talking about is the attitude of the leechers. They think “users” are god-like creatures who deserve to be worshipped by their slaves called “developers”. And money? No, we have to do all this for free. When we ask for money the leechers suddenly shut up and ignore your post, and go whining in another thread. They whine but are not willing to put their money where their mouth is.
Worse, they come up with threats like “if you don’t write top-quality bug-free user-friendly software for free, OSS will never succeed on the desktop!”, “my boss will forever see OSS projects broken amateur toys on SourceForge and you’ll never get a job in the IT field!”, “it your program is not user friendly then don’t release your crap at all!”.
What has the world become? What has become of manners? I’m giving a gift away for free, and I event spend my free time helping people, while I get no reward for it. And the leechers whine and whine. I have never heard of someone who receives a gift and then complains that it isn’t good enough and demands for a better gift. (Well… except maybe Paris Hilton who didn’t like the ring she received from her former fiancee ;)) But apparently the leechers think it’s normal when it comes to software.
But what about closed source software?
People complain all the time that OSS software is inferior to commercial/closed source software, claiming that paid professionals will even work on the boring parts of the program while the OSS hobbyists don’t. Well there’s a truth in that statement, but when you ask those very same people to pay OSS developers, they suddenly shut up and go happily back to whining next time there’s a similar article. And they think their expectation is justified because apparently you’re a god if you can’t write code.
And what about commercial open source software? People never think about that when they compare open source software to commercial software, even though there are many successful commercial open source software, such as Ximian/Novell’s Evolution and OpenOffice.org. Those people praise all commercial software for being user friendly (while critcizing open source software for being unfriendly), but for some reason that doesn’t apply to commercial open source software.
What about closed source freeware? Leechers seem to have completely forgotten about that. They whine all the time about abandoned/pre-alpha projects on SourceForge being an example of how open source software are generally crappy, and praise closed source software for being high quality, but don’t even mention the legion of crappy closed source freeware apps. In fact, hobbyist open source software is almost always better than hobbyist closed source freeware.
What about bad closed source software? Every closed source software has its own flaws and its own set of problems, and their users complain about them. But Slashdotters ignore that completely and act as if closed source software is always perfect.
As for the original issue (the complaint about the response “fixed in CVS”): apparently they’re OK with how closed source software authors deal with the issue. So why don’t we all close public access to CVS and tell them “the fix will be in the next version, and no you can’t get it earlier”, just like closed source authors do?
Mike Hearn said,
May 21, 2006 @ 5:01 pm
I don’t think you should extrapolate the rantings of one loonie to all users
Hongli said,
May 21, 2006 @ 5:08 pm
Unfortunately it’s not just one looney. I see more and more of that kind of comments.
Rob said,
May 22, 2006 @ 9:46 am
You have a point Hongli. Those leechers will
+ Whine if they encounter a bug instead of filing it
+ Whine if the bug is fixed in cvs and there’s no release yet
+ Whine if there is a release but it’s not packaged by their distro yet
+ Whine if the newer release of their distro has the fix but they
haven’t upgraded yet.
They confuse the freedom of source code with freedom of bugging people because of the availability of free communication channels that don’t exist for commercial products.
My advice: ignore.
lucmars said,
May 22, 2006 @ 6:01 pm
I think that people don’t understand yet that one cannot treat every open source project on the same basis. If the project is just an other app in an already explored domain, it’s hard to get an user base which will be committed in the developement ; unless the project brings something else than the usual. If there is the choice, one simply tries the other app and one doesn’t send any feedback.
With an user base, the things go faster and one doesn’t bother with some barking dogs. But most of the time, this arise in some particular domain, where the choice is limited, or where everything is to do.
People don’t see that or don’t even think about that : if they discover the open source, they don’t play neccesarly the game and if they know what is it, they cannot argue a supposed inflexible tradition.
Finally, a point of psychology underlies that : one is more encline to support something that one really needs ; otherwise if the need is already satisfied, one doesn’t bother.