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.
It depends on if the first guy is complaining about having to reinstall this specific software, or if the software borked his entire system to the point that he has to reinstall his entire OS. Because that happened to me once. But in the first scenario he is being a dick, and in the second one not so much.
No. It’s provided without warranty nor guarantee that it’ll work or even leave your system intact. That’s the core of most opensource licenses. Dev owes nobody nothing.
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
In this case, in trying to resolve the issue, he deleted his
node_modulesdirectory. So he’s talking about having to reinstall everything by typingnpm installand waiting for it to finish.oh man…
People can be such dicks, you have my sympathy.
I’ve been thinking about open sourcing a Node project of mine recently… concerning that this is the kind of thing to expect
Well, this isn’t usual. This is actually really rare. Almost all of the interactions I have with users of my libraries are great. People are generally appreciative and kind, or at least not rude. This is an outlier, and I try not to let these things sour my experience.
He’s frustrated and he’s being abrasive because of that, but that doesn’t make him a bad person. I try to respond without being rude back, but just stern. Usually when you do that, people will either not respond again or apologize. I’ve never had a user keep being rude, and if I did, I would just ban them.
Sometimes people just kinda forget that on the internet they’re still talking to other real people, you know?
You’re taking a far calmer approach than i could ever take.
You’re lucky. I left FOSS dev because I got tired of my free time being abused by people like the one in your post
I’ve had to adopt a two strikes policy towards these aggressive trolls, who treat you like your their personal servant, especially since they make up like <1% of ppl on issue trackers. After a warning, if they don’t play nice, then they’re out.
It’s the only way to keep the coding experience enjoyable, and not suffer from burnout.
I disagree, in neither scenario the open source dev owes him anything. You get to use and modify the software for free, but the flip side is you are entitled to nothing.
Malware is free too
Malware is not usually open source.
You’re not entitled to a working computer once you execute a free program?
Honestly, no. It’s your job to vet the software you run. If it’s open source, you had every chance to make sure it wasn’t going to irreversibly break your system ahead of time.
Alternatively, you could pay money for a solution from a reputable company with support.
You’re implying that to even install the simplest of programs, I’d need to read and understannd many thousands of lines of code, starting with the FOSS project itself and then spidering out to every dependency. This speaks nothing of the fact that it may be written in multiple languages, some of which I am not familiar with, and even if I am, code can be written in ways that’s almost impossible to understand. This might take a week for a 200 line project.
Reminds me of when my employer said they were going to stop using open source software until a team had vetted it completely. Lol, once they talked to engineers that idea died immediately.
This. I swear, some people in the FOSS community seem to be convinced everyone who uses a computer is a developer.