[oskarth]

Couldn't agree more. Heuristic to use when someone is bashing someone else's code:

Have you contributed (money, code, docs) to the project?

If the answer is no: person lacking skin in the game - irrelevant (even harmful) armchair comment.

[Pacabel]

I don't think that's very good reasoning.

Bad software is bad software regardless of who has funded it, who has committed code to it, or who has written its documentation.

One does not have to be a contributor to that software in order to analyze it and make a judgment regarding its quality.

[wpietri]

You two are talking about different things.

Analyzing something and making a judgment is fine. But what happens after you do that? If you just file it away, fine. But if you go out and publicly bash somebody with little thought for the circumstances, it makes you look like an asshole, and it is generally, as Oskarth says, and irrelevant and possibly harmful comment.

Open source software is a gift to the world. If somebody does a lot of work to give you something and the first thing out of your mouth is, "This sucks! What's wrong with you for giving me an imperfect gift?" then it comes across as ungrateful. Because it is. Worse, it makes the gift-giver less likely to keep giving.

If you want to offer feedback to an open-source project, first ask yourself, "Am I telling them anything they don't know?" If you think you are, then offer it in a spirit of gratitude and constructive criticism. And think hard about going beyond offering opinions to offering money or labor.

[mst]

I think by 'bashing' oskarth was trying to refer to the part where people are criticising not just the code but at least implicitly also the developers.

One can say 'this code is terrible' without also saying 'How idiotic was the committer'.

[dmoo]

But if you continue to use that software then you probably need to be a little self-critical too.

[antocv]

Fork it. Nothing is stopping you.

[danmaz74]

when someone is bashing someone else's code if you mean free and open source code, I absolutely agree

[Shish2k]

Did you personally take part in the fighting in WWII? If not, how can you say that Hitler was a bad person?

(Deliberately invoking Godwin, because that's the level of logic I'm responding to :P )

[rfrey]

Although I recognize that your intent is a reductio ad absurdum of the parent's point of view. you should also recognize that this comment draws a parallel between the volunteer devs of OpenSSL and Hitler.

[ethanbond]

It does seem like some members of the community nearly see it this way, considering their reactions.