Open source can be brutal, especially with larger and well established projects.
I contribute to several projects as a well recognized person in my field, not at their scale, but everything they say rings true.
Established developers often push back extremely hard on anything new, until and unless it aligns with their current goals. I’ve had maintainers shut me down without hearing out the merits, only to come back a year later when whatever company they work for suddenly sees it as important.
Project leads who will shift goalposts to avoid confronting the clear hostility their deputies show.
I’ve had OSS users call me personal number, or harass me over email for not having their pet interest prioritized over everything else. Often that’s because I’m blocked by the maintainers.
Open source can be extremely brutal and it’s a battle of stamina and politics as much as it’s one of technical merit.
This is not something specific to open source. Unfortunately if you want to be well-known person who works on well-known project you must either ignore all the shit thrown at you altogether or you must be very very resilient. When you react to attacks on internet you will be attacked, often.
And while I appreciate Marcan's work a lot he is also partically responsible because he himself often jumped on bandwagon attacking other people exactly the same way.
There’s a significant difference between open source and proprietary software.
With proprietary software you usually have a corporate mandate, a goal etc to achieve. Any new tech is achieved as part of that drive. You can get people on board or not based on that, and once you’ve decided, there is someone to answer to if you can’t deliver.
Open source doesn’t have that. A project can go in twenty different directions at once, you can say you all agree to something and then have people sabotage it without being answerable to anyone.
Does that make open source worse? No. It’s the trade off for being open, which is extremely valuable but it is a very different push in terms of a product.
For me it wasn't about open source vs proprietary software. I just wanted to say that in areas like game development, online entertainment or just really anything that require interacting with big communities of people on internet there is no way to avoid attacks on yourself.
So leading well known open source project is politics on a small scale and there will be a lot of people who want to hurt or manipulate you.
If you decide to become a public person and want to have fans and supporters then be ready to have haters as well.
Open source can be brutal, especially with larger and well established projects.
I contribute to several projects as a well recognized person in my field, not at their scale, but everything they say rings true.
Established developers often push back extremely hard on anything new, until and unless it aligns with their current goals. I’ve had maintainers shut me down without hearing out the merits, only to come back a year later when whatever company they work for suddenly sees it as important.
Project leads who will shift goalposts to avoid confronting the clear hostility their deputies show.
I’ve had OSS users call me personal number, or harass me over email for not having their pet interest prioritized over everything else. Often that’s because I’m blocked by the maintainers.
Open source can be extremely brutal and it’s a battle of stamina and politics as much as it’s one of technical merit.