About developers users and freebies

20.06.2012 18:56 ·  Notes  ·  thoughts

Inspired by some forum topics and the general attitude of some users (observed in IRC, bugtracker, mailing lists and personal emails). I actually wrote a bit about this a few months ago. One more time and that’s it, I won’t go back to it.

The random user is perplexed and outraged because the developers refuse to implement the feature (which gradually becomes a set of loosely connected features) that the user needs for his specific task. Really, why? First of all, the requested functionality looks strange not only to the developers, but also to many other users who, by the way, have a certain weight and influence in the community (more on this below). This means that the importance and necessity of the requested functionality are highly questionable. The second point that the user persistently ignores is the existence of a third-party plugin that does virtually everything they need. It is enough to make a minimal modification to the plugin yourself or to contact the author (an adequate and responsive person who responds promptly to comments and polite, reasoned requests).

The software is made for everyone, there is a roadmap and a vision for future development. And it makes no sense to add something to the core that only a single user needs, especially if there is a plugin with similar functionality. If the feature is really important and should be in the core — justify it. Developers cannot physically know and foresee everything, so if you can explain to them why it should be this way and not that way, changes will be made. After all, they want the program to be convenient and useful. Just remember that reasons along the lines of “I use your software in my company, so you have to…” look silly as an argument.

Another user complains that developers “resist when bugs are clearly pointed out to them”. Obviously, resistance should be understood as a polite request to describe the nature of the problem and the proposed solution in more detail. By the way, it is at least not nice to reply to a stranger with “wise will understand”. It may well turn out that this person is much wiser than you are.

It’s not unreasonable to repeat a few very simple things here:

• open source software is usually developed by enthusiasts in their spare time, primarily to solve their own problems
• developers are people too (unexpectedly, yes). They have jobs, personal lives and some needs
• strange as it may seem, even a fairly large project like QGIS was developed by a very limited number of people. Now, the number of active developers does not exceed 8 people. For comparison, the number of open issues in redmine is 1155. So you should not expect everyone to rush to fix this particular bug as soon as you file it
• from what has been said above, you can understand that there is more than enough work to do. If you want a response — respect other people’s work and value other people’s time: spend a few minutes writing a clear description of the problem rather than throwing out scattered links to a dozen sites. Nobody wants to collect and analyse information in such a form, which is also accompanied by an arrogant “wise men will understand”

Also don’t resent the fact that some bugs are fixed when

the problem will “hit” one of the developers or people who have influence over them

It’s expected and normal. Let me try to explain why this happens.

The reason people get into development is almost always the same: they need a convenient tool to solve their problems. As a result, people first work on what they need/are interested in. In other words, people make software for themselves. It is logical that the bugs that hinder the developer personally will be fixed first. The same goes for adding new features.

Furthermore, in any relatively large project, each developer has their own area of responsibility. Some developers are responsible for one subsystem, others for two or three. And no one is going to dive into someone else’s code without a real need: it takes time. And as I have already mentioned, developers tend to be enthusiasts and spend their own free time on it. Do you think there will be many people willing to dig into someone else’s code, with a vague description of the problem and no way to reproduce the bug, instead of doing something more interesting?

Now about “people who have influence over them”. Usually, these are not just some abstract John or Jane. Developers are influenced by people who are recognised in a field, who have knowledge and authority, and who are doing something useful. Both recognition and influence do not just appear, they are well-earned. These people have already proven that their opinions count for something; they not only take from the community but also support it (not necessarily financially, though it can be financial support too). Of course, we shouldn’t ignore the factor of personal sympathy: I don’t think anyone would argue that people are more likely to help their friends than complete strangers.

All of the above applies to “volunteer-based” development. If you are not satisfied with such an arrangement — find your own way to motivate people. When the canton of Solothurn needed annotations, they didn’t moan “Do it for us, we use QGIS”. Instead, they approached Marco, described the problem, got him interested, and soon got what they wanted. When Andreas finds a bug, he reports it with a detailed description and a test dataset. In urgent cases, he always finds a developer willing to help solve the problem. And these are not isolated examples.

Perhaps you should reconsider your attitude to opensource?