Open Source Entitlement

A few weeks ago I stumbled upon a GitHub issue asking about an ETA for an upcoming v1 release of this project. It word for word went like:

at this point - there's not been a release date, it would be helpful if your organization put a commit date on a road map and stuck to it. I can't move forward with a project using Bulma if I'm going to have to rewrite it in a month or two. Most clients don't want to pay for double work - and in my LTS I can't just be putting out products that will be retired in a month or two.

I find it almost negligence at this point to not be able to say when. this is a real issue - and it needs addressed, you closed beta for months now and should've had RC1 ready to go.

So of course I'm always interested in a new version of a product I like. In this case I was watching closely for the v1 release of Bulma because it would offer native dark mode support via CSS variables. This is the top requested feature for my Leaf project which is presently built on Bulma.

However, the tone of this user rubbed me the wrong way. This is a free product that is open source. You can sponsor the project, but the sponsorship items are more directed at just advertising your company logo as a thanks.

Your name or company logo will appear in the sidebar of each Bulma documentation page (1.5M+ pageviews per month).

This makes sense, because I remember another repository that had a donation perk called "link me a bug to fix". Someone donated the larger amount and then picked a bug that was in backlog for years. Of course it was there for a reason and the maintainer declined fixing that issue as it would require a rewrite. The donator got in a fit and requested a refund.

So you can donate to Bulma, but best I understand it there is no visible support contracts associated with Bulma directly. You can however wait in line and hire the maintainer directly for a contract of work. Perhaps you directly fund the creation/work of Bulma itself in the way your organization needs it.

So I jump back to that thread and see a few responses back n forth:

Just wait until they release the version and in the meantime stick with 0.9.4 as we all do.

So of course this upset user fires back.

we are an enterprise organization - you have no idea what you are speaking on and frankly I didn't ask you about waiting I asked for a release date. we have large teams of people - you have no idea what the EOL/EOS date so your LTS strategy is flawed. its clear by your comment that you've not worked in an enterprise of any dynamic.

This user is clear - they don't care about anything else but knowing a release date for this product. At this point I am actually typing a response, but someone beats me to it.

Hey man, if the v1 is so urgent to your enterprise, then sponsor the project. This is a free/open source project. So your demands don't have a place here. And by the way, if your enterprise isnt capable to work with changelling projects, so your administration isnt right, because all the free/open source projects is changin constantly, you can work with stable releases and do a migration in a few months/years, or you can choose another framework.

So, if you arent pay or sponsor the project, then take it easy and be patient.

Outside of some typos and difficulty to read - the user summarized basically what I was trying to say. At this point the angry user just collapses further into insulting replies. He fires back with the response below.

you going to commit resources for that? you going to pay for it? you going to go and get blue dollars in the middle of q1? go do it houdini. sorry - but that is the fact. we pass for now. it would just be nice for the product owners to commit to a road map. this is standard industry best practice. this is our road map - not loosely just throw out an arbitrary date. just saying we run agile - so this kind of stuff, these kind of replies are not helpful.

He then believes that Open Source or not should keep a functioning roadmap. I don't even see a roadmap for Laravel, which is a extremely popular open source piece of software. Don't worry though, this user will fire back again and try and make it clear how easy it is to produce and maintain a roadmap.

how to create a project roadmap

https://www.teamwork.com/project-management-guide/project-roadmap/

open source or not - one person has to be the project manager and GSD. It's not me though - sorry. I already work enough.

your response - read https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/17lemv5/open_source_is_struggling_and_its_not_big_tech/

At this point a few other users chime in to shut down this individual and hes had enough. One last short message and he disappears from the thread.

loser

I feel bad for whoever work in real life with that person - he seems unhinged. Now of course my curiosity was peeked so I went to his GitHub page and it was bare empty as I expected. Just GitHub issues that are really "support" issues in an insulting tone.

It reminded me of a user that came by the Apktool GitHub page, which ended up being the first user I ever blocked on GitHub.

It started with an odd titled issue - "[BUG] This APKTOOL is starting to be usless so much errors and nothis works with this tool it's been 4 days now trying to figure out how to fix it."

The stack-trace was msfvenom with Facebook, so of course someone is trying to pack the Facebook application with some malware.

So I just closed the issue for the combined toxicity of the response. This user fired back quite quickly.

I did all imaginable things you would think about and nothing works try to fix your app and if it's not working it's not necessary to let it available for downloading.

The next morning my inbox was full of unrelated issues with toxic remarks from the same guy. It could be unrelated bugs or something - this random engineer from Morocco was upset greatly at me.

So I used the GitHub block feature for the first time ever. I donate time and energy which for the most part goes unpaid to work on Apktool so I don't have time for assholes.

So when I see folks have this sense of entitlement for something free and open source - I get tilted and write a blog to dump my raw thoughts.