[jacquesm]

Advice is worth what you paid for it and even if you solicit advice you are not required to take it, especially if taking that advice implies you have to do stuff that runs counter to your nature and views.

Patrick's advice is very good: for Patrick. But for Colin it was more of an exercise in how you could run Tarsnap, not how he should run Tarsnap. Meanwhile, Tarsnap is still in business many years later, has happy customers and as far as I know happy people running it.

[peteforde]

All fair points, and Patrick acknowledged this at the time - and in the previous HN thread back in 2014. I remember it was a good one.

The detail that really pets me backwards is the whole "if you're here, you already know what this is for and how to use it" vibe. It's not just Tarsnap; many aspects of the OSS world uphold this most unfortunate tradition. I believe with all of my heart that it is unnecessarily hostile and antisocial.

Many of the founders and teams I've mentored over the years have experienced me spending a large amount of time and effort explaining the importance of clearly stating why a thing exists and why you should use it; how it works and how it will not create additional unknown risks; what tools it is intended to replace... as the barest civil minimum.

This is just my opinion, but it's a hill I'd die on if necessary.

[jacquesm]

It matters to you because you care about seeing things succeed according to your definition of success but consider that there are different kinds of people some of which are more than happy to present their works in such a way that it doesn't turn into a runaway marketing machine but presents itself more like you would look at a utility. I have a project like that myself in the works and if it ever starts to take on a life of its own beyond where I'm having fun with it and it is just useful to others I will have to make a very hard choice: transform it into an actual business or to hobble it in such a way that it won't take off (or possibly even to shut it down). Which of those two it will be I can't tell you but in the meantime I've done what I could do to ensure that no matter what I choose users of the service will have perfect data portability with a local installation.

Founders that are in the funding cycle would obviously benefit from Patrick's advice they are going to increase their chances at commercial success that way. But if commercial success isn't your #1 goal there are other viable paths based on your priorities in life. And that's a hill that I'd die on if necessary because I don't believe that everything has to be run as a marketing driven profit maximization engine. The OSS world upholds that tradition pretty good and I'm fully supportive of it, there are many paths to a happy life and not all of them run through a wallet.

[peteforde]

I agree, understand and appreciate.

I want to clarify, though, that in talking about the unfortunate number of OSS projects which convey the "if you're here, you need no explanation", I am absolutely not hung up on profit motives.

Instead, I am talking about the times where you are searching for a technical solution with only a vague intuition about the shape of an approach and some faith that it might exist. And you land on a project homepage that contains so little context that the only reasonable reaction is to have serious doubts that you're in the right place.

You're right, I do care. I have spent a huge amount of my life publishing OSS under different licenses and I want people to experience maximum benefit from that effort. It boggles my mind that people work so hard to build useful tools and then appear to actively gaslight potential users into feeling inadequate instead of attempting even the most basic onboarding advice.

Folks are not obligated to make their code or projects accessible, but if you can't justify even a simple "this is why this exists" statement somewhere prominent that conveys intent without inference or telepathy, I believe that they give up their right to grumble that nothing they do matters and nobody cares.

[jacquesm]

Well, there is an old English proverb that applies here: you don't look a gift horse in the mouth. Obviously OSS writers could in many cases do better at communications. But communicating clearly is a skill that is unfortunately not all that common and there is an interesting thing about the very best programmers that I know: they all seem to excel at dialogue with the machine but only a small fraction of them is equally skilled at dialogue with humans, present or in writing. This creates an obvious and immediate problem: without infrastructure those people are still going to be able to create useful software, various tools and so on, but those tools are going to be bereft of documentation and explanation. This is the case for a large chunk of all open source projects and if you look a bit more closely at this you'll probably find that the most successful open source projects are successful primarily because their creators either had great communications skills (possibly even better than they had software skills) or that they found someone to contribute that skill early on in the project.

So what you are seeing is entirely the expected outcome!

[Aeolun]

> I believe with all of my heart that it is unnecessarily hostile and antisocial.

I used to believe this. And maybe at some point it was, but then the world, and the sector, was absolutely _flooded_ with script kiddies.

Now things that immediately confuse people that don't at least have a halfway decent idea of what they're about satisfy me.