I absolutely hate open source drama. I don’t want to read your diary when I use your software, I want it to work.
I’m not even against running a parallel for-profit for extra features or corporate sponsorships. People gotta eat. I’d much rather have that than deal with following sob stories about ruthless leadership, ego clashes in contributors and endless forking because everybody thinks everybody else sucks.
The more I hang out around here, where OSS is a bit of a religion, the more disenchanted I am with it and the more I think the big game changer for this space is getting contributions on usability, production and business rather than code.
These shareholders have reportedly used the project’s donation funds for personal expenses, like holiday trips, raising serious concerns about financial transparency.
But it’s a problem for the team, not the user, right? It’s one of those things where in closed software it’s either… well, the point of the thing, or if it isn’t people would get quietly fired and move on trying to impact the perception of the product as little as possible.
Here it impacts the product in that you may have to learn about it, learn about the fork and transition to the fork. There’s no separation between the HR/organizational issues and the software issues, and that’s a bit of a problem, I think, and why it reads as frequent drama.
I don’t know about that. I am not privvy to the internal politics of most commercial software developers and that’s a good thing. I guess there is some drama about whatever layoffs, corporate business practices or enshittification those are deploying, but I am a big enough man to concede that, while objectively worse, it annoys me less. At least you get to be outraged and holier-than-thou with those instead of losing faith in the ability of smart people to be mature and collectively productive.
And no, production practices and usability aren’t the same as coding, even if they are implemented in code. Unfortunately, I do think that confusion is… widespread in that community. It’s a very engineer-driven space and that has downsides. I do get why, engineers don’t like to be managed on top of contributing to things freely and there are fewer people in those capacities willing to donate their time who aren’t programmers with a side skill, which in aggregate explains a lot.
Damn.
I absolutely hate open source drama. I don’t want to read your diary when I use your software, I want it to work.
I’m not even against running a parallel for-profit for extra features or corporate sponsorships. People gotta eat. I’d much rather have that than deal with following sob stories about ruthless leadership, ego clashes in contributors and endless forking because everybody thinks everybody else sucks.
The more I hang out around here, where OSS is a bit of a religion, the more disenchanted I am with it and the more I think the big game changer for this space is getting contributions on usability, production and business rather than code.
I think it’s a people issue rather than FOSS issue. People interested in this stuff are just like that.
That’s depressing for different reasons, but still a bummer.
That thing is definitely a problem though.
But it’s a problem for the team, not the user, right? It’s one of those things where in closed software it’s either… well, the point of the thing, or if it isn’t people would get quietly fired and move on trying to impact the perception of the product as little as possible.
Here it impacts the product in that you may have to learn about it, learn about the fork and transition to the fork. There’s no separation between the HR/organizational issues and the software issues, and that’s a bit of a problem, I think, and why it reads as frequent drama.
You know, wherever you are, drama is inescapable. At least with OSS the community seems to have control over the drama.
Isn’t that made in code?
I don’t know about that. I am not privvy to the internal politics of most commercial software developers and that’s a good thing. I guess there is some drama about whatever layoffs, corporate business practices or enshittification those are deploying, but I am a big enough man to concede that, while objectively worse, it annoys me less. At least you get to be outraged and holier-than-thou with those instead of losing faith in the ability of smart people to be mature and collectively productive.
And no, production practices and usability aren’t the same as coding, even if they are implemented in code. Unfortunately, I do think that confusion is… widespread in that community. It’s a very engineer-driven space and that has downsides. I do get why, engineers don’t like to be managed on top of contributing to things freely and there are fewer people in those capacities willing to donate their time who aren’t programmers with a side skill, which in aggregate explains a lot.
Not necessarily what’s happening here, but still.