[yjftsjthsd-h]

> I think one of the major problems with open source development is its hard to ever remove anything because the vocal minority who likes it will hound you. But removing things is just as, if not more important to good software as adding features.

As opposed to non-OSS, where removing features that paying customers care about is of course trivial?

> Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/1172/

I don't mindless comic and its original context, but it's gotten extremely old seeing it wheeled out to justify completely discarding user input on any change. Sometimes an update does break legitimate workflows, and that is bad.

[cletusw]

The difference is for proprietary features, you can just charge that subset of users that care for its maintenance, using that money to hire additional developers, etc. For OSS you instead have a relatively fixed budget of time & resources and have to balance competing interests in a zero-sum manner. On the flip side, there's nothing preventing the vocal minority from forking if the feature is important enough to them!

[bawolff]

> As opposed to non-OSS, where removing features that paying customers care about is of course trivial?

When the amount they are paying you is much less then the amount it costs to maintain it is, then yes it is usually fairly easy.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

I wish my career had entirely comprised of as functional of companies as you seem to work in.