People who use community-developed, open source software need to acquaint themselves with a very important principle – everyone has equal responsibility towards the state of the product, because everyone is able to contribute and people who do contribute do it voluntarily.
Don’t get angry and take it out on the contributers when you want a feature and it fails to happen – especially the “LOOK OUTLOOK HAS IT” kind. None of us are any more obliged to spend our time implementing your feature than you are. You are not a customer, and we are not here to serve you. We are a community, and the responsibility for ensuring and improving the quality of our product lies evenly spread upon our joint shoulders.
Some of us have spent hours and hours of our own free time learning how to fix bugs, develop features, triage bugs, write documentation or make any other innumerable kinds of contribution to the community project. The absolute least you can do if you don’t want to learn to join us is to keep your tongue in check when talking to the people who have taken the time off to work on the stuff you use.
And please do not say that something is “easy“. If you actually know that it is easy, please just fix it. If you don’t really know, then please don’t sum up hours of someone else’s effort with that one unflattering, inconsiderate, and completely useless word.
Thank you.
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Dustin
Ouch there are some ungrateful people apparently. I, unfortunately, don’t belong to the open source community, but if people are doing that I doubt I would want to do anything. I’m actually thinking about making a Linux machine.
Jason "moofang"
Nah, open source communities in my experience are actually really awesome communities full of great people that are very friendly and supportive. But ironically it is in the successful projects that you see these things most often. Because successful projects have a large non-contributing userbase, there tends to be a more defined line between regular users and ‘the devs’, and some people start taking it for granted that it is ‘the devs’ job to do what they think is the right thing.
And actually, since you use Thunderbird (and probably Firefox too), you’re already a part of the community by many definitions :) Indeed, just choosing to use open source software already does something small for the overall cause because it sends out the message that open source products are a worthy (or superior!) choice over existing commercial/proprietary ones.
Great that you’re thinking about trying Linux! If you need any help/input on that, feel free to ping me. Of course, no guarantees that I’ll be smart enough to answer but I’ll try :)
dai1313
ohhh… Looks like we might have a future linux user on our hands… *looks at Dustin*.
As far as people knowing linux near me… My advisor in school is a linux user. He seems to know a VERY impressive amount of information on the kernel, and favors Suse. Now this it the best part… HE IS A RELIGION TEACHER, not a computer teacher as you might expect. I seem to be fortunately in an area with a nice concentration of people who has tried linux – or at least know what it is.
Ack! The bell rang!
Dustin
I actually have Windows 7 on my new desktop, but my labtop could probably go for an install of Linux.
Linux seems to teach you a lot about all sorts of stuff. Jason is a regular hacker and from the sight of the Ubunchu post I think I know why.
Jason "moofang"
@ dai1313: Yeah I know! You find Linux users in the weirdest places. My old philosophy class tutor used to show us full-screen slides during tutorial, then one day he needed to look for another file and takes the presentation off full-screen mode and poof out pops Xubuntu! Shock of my life I kid thee not. Ironically the impression I get is there are more Linux users in my university outside the school of computing than inside, if you don’t count the profs.
@ Dustin: Man, I’m glad I was able to give Linux a positive image, although I wish I could consider myself deserving of being called a ‘regular hacker’ x) Nevermind, I’ll consider this motivation to hack moar and become deserving! It turns out that there is a very diverse range of important contributions beyond hacking though, and if you pop over to Planet KDE (see blogroll) once in awhile you’d see what I mean. For example, a usability expert recently volunteered to collaborate with KDE’s icon artist to conduct a series of surveys to analyse and improve the usability of the present icon set. I hack in part because it’s what I think is fun to do :)