So even with the recent ship jumping over to a plethora of Apple products, I still find myself to be an open source supporter, contributor and maybe even a part-time aficionado. But as of late, I gotta say, I’m starting to hate the ecosystem a bit, from at least two perspectives as a developer.
As the lead maintainer of a project
I’ve built quite a few things in my day and nearly all of them have been released for mass consumption. The one consistent thing I’ve ran into as the lead maintainer of an open source project are feature requests. It should do this, it outta do that, you should add this, you can’t expect to have anyone use this without it being able to do that. Guess what assholes, part of why something gets open sourced is so that you can build upon it. Often times when someone builds something, they build just enough to fulfill their requirements and then put it out there for the rest of the world to improve upon (this is very often my scenario outside of bug fixes that are affecting my use of the project [MVP much?]). Stop being so fucking lazy and help me as I was able to help you by starting the project.
As someone that forked and contributed to a project
I don’t mind forking a project, adding in a bug fix and/or hacking in some code that will expand the functionality a bit. What I do mind is when I go through the effort to do so, take the time to send a pull request and I never hear anything back on it. Why the hell did you put the project up on GitHub (their tagline is Social Coding mind you), make it publicly available for me to fork and contribute and hand it back to you on a silver platter, and then completely ignore my contribution? At least log in and deny it because I reformatted too much of your precious project or something. Negative feedback is significantly better than no feedback at all. All I wanted to do was make your project better and help other people just like I assumed you wanted to do when you released the code in the first place.
I’m done ranting (for now) but seriously, I’m really starting to think that open source is just a code flea market for folks that believe copy and paste is a design pattern. Also, I was going to link to a blog post by my buddy Dean regarding how folks don’t contribute enough in the open source ecosystem but all you fucking assholes left enough shitty comments to force him to take it down (shame on you all, ever last one of you cheap, freeloading bastards).
