[cashewchoo]

I don't get why this is specifically directed at gratis/free software, though. It's not like commercial software is much better. I spent a lot of time in the beginning of my career punching extremely expensive proprietary software into submission. Things like Solidworks, Autocad, Windows itself, nvidia drivers, various scientific/engineering programs, circuit designing programs, etc.

Tons of extremely expensive licensed software, with expensive support contracts, and we still spent a ton of time and wrote a ton of Perl to punch them into a shape that worked on our very vanilla installs of Windows 7 enterprise. Contacting anyone's support was invariably an absolute fucking joke of an endeavor. We literally only ever did it when we were sick and tired of bashing our heads against their shitty software and wanted to shelf the project for a week or two to recover our sanity while their support "looked into it" and "escalated our ticket" or whatever.

My experience with whether software was more like Stripe or more like a piano sitting on the sidewalk is that it completely depends on the company's attitude. Either they care that people be able to actually use their software, or they don't. I've seen both huge corporate products and small free software projects that both clearly do not care much about whether someone can get their program working easily.

And I've also seen both paid software and free software that care immensely about getting you started and keeping you going.

[EvanAnderson]

My experience mirrors yours.

I have never experienced frustration with free/open-source/source-available software like I have with proprietary software.

If I had a dollar for every damned time I was dealing with proprietary software and became frustrated that I just couldn't looked at the source code to figure out what the programmer meant... sigh

When I do contact support I end up taking to people who also don't have source code access. They might have better documentation and a more comprehensive knowledge base, but they're no more equipped to look at the code (and, arguably, probably less equipped to understand the code) than me.

Occasionally I find proprietary software whose accompanying documentation is sufficient to troubleshoot the really bizarre problems w/o source code access. Microsoft's protocol disclosures, created because of the EU anti-trust action, are a good example.

Having source code access and a modicum of reverse engineering and programming knowledge is a game changer for supporting software.

[hsitz]

Yes, you are correct. The people who say the "piano" comment was meant just as an observation, not as criticism are wrong. They're ignoring that this was made as an "observation" specifically about free software, with the obvious implication that this is a key difference between "free" software and commercial software. That means: this was not _merely_ an "observation"; it was an observation intended to be a criticism of free software. This is just basic reading and interpretation skills. (Could this interpretation of the comment as a "criticism" be wrong? Of course, but I think that's highly unlikely.)

[TheOtherHobbes]

Free software was literally supposed to solve all of these problems. Free access to source magically makes it easy for everyone to contribute bug fixes and (less convincingly...) good documentation.

Of course this rarely happens. Developer/maintainer attitude is one factor, but it's not the only one.