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by dt3ft 1987 days ago
There is very little to no awareness of what it takes to create software. We, the developers who have released our work for free, have allowed this to happen. It feels like mobbing, heck, we keep reading about other devs mobbing others by opening GitHub issues and demanding new features or bugfixes for software they did not pay for. I really hope that we can do something about raising awareness.
3 comments

I can’t remember if it was always that way. When the App Store opened I guess there was a standard price of 59p for an app. Before that, 59p would have been seen as a ridiculous price to pay for a copy of software. Imagine buying windows 95 on a CD for 59p. By setting the bar so low for app prices at the start, it’s possibly just become the way it is now.
If there's one thing to raise awareness about in software development, it's probably not low pay.
This got worse with the introduction of GitHub. Obnoxious users were always a problem, but before centralized OSS warehouses at least they had to go to the project's web site and mailing list.

Where they'd be told to get lost if they misbehaved.

With GitHub, the branding of products is lost and most credit goes to GitHub. If a user isn't satisfied, he does the proverbial left-swipe and goes to the next project in a second.

If you tell a user to get lost, you violate the tenets of the new corporate sponsored cultural revolution: Newcomers are always right.

The last 10 years have been a coordinated attack on OSS to make developers obedient and silent cogs. It works, because at present they are showered with money in return.

Will it continue to work in 5 or 10 years?