I think it’s more akin to complaining about the public transit in a city where the public transit funded via donations. Yeah, you could pitch in, and maybe you do, but it’s still a massive undertaking that is also massively underfunded, and even if you have an idea of what you want to change, you might not have the skills to fix it yourself, or even to file an actually helpful bug report. Should you learn how to engage with the process of opensource tool maintenance? Yes! It’s a cool and fun thing to do. Is it hard for most people who aren’t familiar with software development? Also very yes.
To be clear, I don’t think maintainers have any obligation to see or think about whatever gets posted to social media. Trying to stay on top of what the internet is saying is an impossible task. But as a user and sometimes contributor, I like reading about what trials other users are going through, and if a complaint resonates with me I like to chat about it, and occasionally I’ll pull down the source code for a project and see if I can figure out how to patch whatever it is we’re talking about. For most of these cases I’ll give up or get distracted before I have anything worthwhile to contribute, but every once in a while I’ll get a PR submitted that spawned from a random conversation on the internet.
I think it’s more akin to complaining about the public transit in a city where the public transit funded via donations. Yeah, you could pitch in, and maybe you do, but it’s still a massive undertaking that is also massively underfunded, and even if you have an idea of what you want to change, you might not have the skills to fix it yourself, or even to file an actually helpful bug report. Should you learn how to engage with the process of opensource tool maintenance? Yes! It’s a cool and fun thing to do. Is it hard for most people who aren’t familiar with software development? Also very yes.
To be clear, I don’t think maintainers have any obligation to see or think about whatever gets posted to social media. Trying to stay on top of what the internet is saying is an impossible task. But as a user and sometimes contributor, I like reading about what trials other users are going through, and if a complaint resonates with me I like to chat about it, and occasionally I’ll pull down the source code for a project and see if I can figure out how to patch whatever it is we’re talking about. For most of these cases I’ll give up or get distracted before I have anything worthwhile to contribute, but every once in a while I’ll get a PR submitted that spawned from a random conversation on the internet.