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by DrewADesign 1366 days ago
Yeah... I've put well over 10k hours into writing FOSS and consistently encounter this attitude there, too. I never imagined we could get this far tolerating such frequent contempt for both end-users and their advocates, such as interface designers. If your PR poses even a theoretical future inconvenience to developers, good luck getting it merged, regardless of the user benefit. Until this changes, user-facing open source alternatives will always be alternatives rather than the standard.
3 comments

Boxed software Microsoft: if it breaks, then Microsoft is wrong.

FOSS and new Microsoft: if it breaks, have you tried pulling the latest? Yes? Then it's a bug in your expectations.

Not just devs and end users, but also devs and other devs. Not in rejecting pulls but changing API's like renaming functions, removing functions, swapping argument positions, changing the complete workflow of a library, etc... without care. The amount of breakage in the OSS world is just ridiculous.

I'm probably biased because I deal with a lot of Javascript where this sort of behaviour is rampant.

> I'm probably biased because I deal with a lot of Javascript where this sort of behaviour is rampant.

It's overall. The size of libraries in a linux system [1] has grown steadily over the years wirhout bringing anything useful.

The QT and GTK libraries are the perfect example of incompatibilities and bad design.

[1] Slackware which did not changed much in term of offered programs over the years.

It’s easy to optimize for developer convenience when you aren’t getting paid to do the work… arguably it’s the only way non-profit open source software can progress at all on average. The tails are heavy, though.
If you write the program for yourself, yes. Why then bother with an OSS licence ?