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by robflynn 1225 days ago
The open source community can be wild sometimes. Back when I was still maintainer and lead dev for Gaim (not Pidgin), I would occasionally get downright hateful people e-mailing me for not implementing whatever feature they thought needed to be implemented, or not getting it implemented quickly enough. One guy managed to get ahold of my cell phone number somehow and called me at 4am to discuss "his ideas" with me for the project. I ended up having to change my number.

Thankfully 95% of the people I interacted with in the community were great and were great, but that other 5% was rough.

4 comments

Old coworker of mine was/is(?) secretly the primary contributor to a a major console emulator. He revealed it to me only after working together for about 4 years.

He keeps it incognito because the vitriol his alias receives from impassioned members of the community makes him afraid of getting doxxed. He showed me some of them. I don't blame him.

Those are 100% just people who want all their pirated games to work properly and have no technical interest in the emulator.
Obligatory "not all emulated games/software are pirated".
Loved Gaim. Got a lot of good use out of it. Thanks a bunch for your work.
Gaim was an amazing help in my life at the time. Huge thank you.
<3 Gaim.