[bad_user]

Personally I would rather have people contribute to open-source and quit when they want. I rather prefer the "clusterfucks" you mention, versus the alternative.

That's the nature of open-source that people don't understand: it's not about getting stuff for free, although that's a nice side-effect. Instead it's about having the freedom to fork it.

So if you find yourself in such a situation, either donate enough money to keep the maintainer happy or step up and contribute.

[shinratdr]

> So if you find yourself in such a situation, either donate enough money to keep the maintainer happy or step up and contribute.

I think saying essentially "throw unlimited funds at it with no promise of a solution or 'patch it yourself'" is also simply glossing over the problem. "I prefer it" is a great justification for you, it doesn't solve the issue for anyone else though and it's not a productive line of thinking.

[moonchrome]

>throw unlimited funds at it with no promise of a solution or 'patch it yourself'

Riighht... because support, contractors/integrators don't exist in the open source world.

The fact that the source is available is just another fallback on top of others. As someone who actually deployed closed source systems in production I can't even begin to describe how superior the opensource alternative is. Basically putting your project at the mercy of some corporate third world tech support department and three layers of bullshit between you and the guy writing code, priced as gold. When you trace down race conditions in binaries/using DTrace and send a detailed description of the problem only to get to some Indian dude who doesn't even understand what you're trying to communicate - "dropping down to source and patch it yourself" is a utopia and being able to hire the guy who wrote it or sent patches is a dream.

[shinratdr]

Such a specialized situation it's not even worth discussing.