You speak as if it’s only generosity that motivates people to contribute to open source. That power, recognition, career advancement, or even salary (which may not be publicly acknowledged) are not factors.

You can say the same about moderators on forums or hobby wikis. I think a lot of them are motivated by the sense of ownership and power they have over others within a particular area of interest.

In my town restaurants come and go so fast the yellow pages are basically always obsolete.

It’s free dirt steak or overcooked chicken or one of those delivery meal kits where you have to cook everything yourself.

But the whole point about the dirt steak is that simply not dropping it in the dirt would be so much less effort than all the arguing that has already gone on in this thread. Everyone arguing against me is trying to justify feeding people dirt because “passion project > building something really nice, clean, and polished that users love”, which is why so much of open source on the desktop remains a niche hobby for 3 decades and counting.

Except in the case that I originally brought up, which seems like years ago in this thread: thousands of people complaining about the same issue.

Then no one takes the project seriously.

They aren’t though. Hardly any open source projects are completely unique types of software with no alternatives.

But you’re free to criticize, free to fork, and free to ignore in the open source world. Can’t take the criticism? Too bad! Grow a spine!

Well with software the steak analogy breaks down. You’re making one steak and an unlimited number of people get to eat copies of that steak. They’re all perfect copies of a nicely cooked steak, but they all have dirt on them. And for some reason you think it’s more important to fiddle around with the charcoal instead of offering steaks without dirt.

There’s no expectation here. You’re free to walk away from a project any time. You’re free to take your ball and go home. The question is about whether you’re immune to criticism.

I say that when you put a project out into public and people start using it, you invite criticism (but also praise, of course). The issue is with people who think they’re only entitled to praise and not criticism. They want to have their cake and eat it too.

Out of tens of thousands of people actually visiting, only 1% are actually taking the time to say anything about the dirty steaks. Everyone else is just quietly leaving after seeing the chef shout down a guy for complaining about the dirt, and then throwing his bbq tongs at them!

Let’s continue with the barbecue analogy. I come to your barbecue and you drop my steak on the ground and then just put it on my plate covered in dirt and tell me “it’s a free steak, if you don’t like dirt on it, then leave!”

See how it works? You don’t want a community, you just want an adoring fanbase for your passion project!

Even setting aside Patreon or whatever else, I think you’re still wrong about public passion project developers getting to do whatever they want and not have people criticize them for it. If you invite people into your space and then pull the rug out from under them, people are going to treat you like an asshole because you are one for doing that.

Yes, because you invented the term “software people” and I took the ball and ran with it. If you’re now going to deny such a distinction then I don’t know what else to tell you.

The key part there is that they’re not paid. So working on a passion project is all that matters.

No, it isn’t. That’s not how it worked on the playground as little kids and it isn’t how it works in the open source community.

Think of it like this: if you’re playing by yourself in your own personal sandbox in the back yard of your house, you’re free to do whatever you want with the sandcastles you build. But, as soon as you invite all the neighbourhood kids to join you, it doesn’t matter if you built the biggest sandcastle before anyone else arrived: you’re now in a social environment where social rules and etiquette apply.

If the other kids politely critique the sandcastle and suggest improvements that you don’t agree with (or don’t think are important), then you’re faced with a dilemma: either compromise and work out a way forward that’s satisfactory (if not perfect) for everyone, or ignore them and face a potential breakup of the community as well as the ostracism which tends to follow. Even worse is something like deciding “no, this is my sandbox, everybody get out!”

Now, if you’ve got the foresight to post a sign by the sandbox which lays out all the rules and expectations for participation, then you have a lot better chance of getting everything to work out. But the idea that “this is my passion project” trumps everything else is not gonna fly in basically any community above a handful of people.

Everyone is focused on the right things, from their own perspective. One of the biggest challenges with large projects is getting everyone on the same page about what’s important.

Look, I’m not saying software engineers are clueless or whatever. I think this issue occurs throughout large projects and organizations: people working on one specific part tend to see that part as the most important but people working on other parts tend to see it as less important than it is. We’re all naturally biased by our own perspectives.

I do agree that MBAs as a concept are broken. You can’t train people to be experts in all things business. The needs of specific businesses are learned only through hard experience in that business.

Many of them often are, through donations / Patreon / etc.

Why does that matter? People always say that about open source! “If you don’t like it then fix it yourself!” And then they complain that no one wants to use it!

You can’t have it both ways. If you’re just building it for yourself then keep it to yourself. If you open it up to the public then people are going to complain if there’s issues (or just ignore it outright if it sucks).

Having said all that, I do have a lot of sympathy for volunteer devs who promise to fix issues after they complete some core rewrite or major refactor, as long as they’re open about it and make a good case for it being necessary. I have a lot less sympathy for developers who are forever bored of fixing issues and just want to endlessly break things by doing rewrites and other fun hobby stuff. If you’re going to do that then don’t present your project as if it were part of the open source community; it’s your hobby, not a community project.

How does that pertain to the above issue of businesses and MBAs and software which was nothing to do with physical engineering work? Like if you’re saying only people who understand fluid dynamics know how to build business software and the people who engage in passion project rewrites on Linux software don’t, then what? I have no idea what you’re really arguing here.

There’s no professional organization that all software engineers belong to, the way we have with civil engineers. This leads to a ton of ambiguity about who is a true engineer and who are software people, as you call them. This is an issue even among people who know how to write their own software.

So then should we really be surprised that non-technical MBAs can’t tell the difference between true engineers and software people?

Plenty of engineers struggle to care about the right things too though. You can witness this in Linux communities. The engineers will engage in passion-project rewrites of core systems any day of the week over fixing that one annoying UI bug that thousands of users complain endlessly about.

Apologies are an admission of liability in the corporate world, therefore extremely rare. Corporate-speak non-apologies (with sweeping changes to reverse the damage) are just about the best you can hope for. If you’re looking for someone to blame for the non-apologies, blame lawyers. Otherwise blame Microsoft for everything they’ve done to screw up Windows (which is far worse than a silly non-apology).