I used to maintain a fairly popular and important open source project and I can definitely empathize with lots of what Andrew has written.
What always fascinated me is just how much the form of a request impacted the probability that I would spend energy to help. Someone who submits a polite and well thought-out bug report just makes you want to help them. OTOH someone writing "Hey when will you fix your stupid bug? My startup has already lost $XXX in revenue because of you" just fills you with schadenfreude and makes you want to troll that person, even if the request is essentially the same in both cases. Some users just don't understand how much they undermine their requests. This kind of attitude may work if you are a boss or a customer, but open source runs on common courtesy.
One bit of the article that I disagreed with is classifying "Just chiming in to say that I would also really like this feature" as rude. Yes, it is passive aggression, but it is better than active aggression and still provides a bit of valuable information. Open source at its best is like a swarm of locusts devouring the problem domain and for this to work information must flow from users back to developers.
Oh, and thanks for your open source work, burntsushi!
Yeah I agreed that this call-out seemed out of place. I wouldn't even categorize it as passive aggressive. I see it as attempting to give input as to what ought to be prioritized. The intent seems positive to me as long as it's not pushy.
Now, maybe the maintainer doesn't want this form of input, or prefers to have the input in the form of issue voting, etc. Overall though I don't see the action as inherently rude.
"rude" is perhaps too strong of a word. I've added a clarification to the article since a lot of folks seem to be getting hung up on this. I also responded to this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22098281
What always fascinated me is just how much the form of a request impacted the probability that I would spend energy to help. Someone who submits a polite and well thought-out bug report just makes you want to help them. OTOH someone writing "Hey when will you fix your stupid bug? My startup has already lost $XXX in revenue because of you" just fills you with schadenfreude and makes you want to troll that person, even if the request is essentially the same in both cases. Some users just don't understand how much they undermine their requests. This kind of attitude may work if you are a boss or a customer, but open source runs on common courtesy.
One bit of the article that I disagreed with is classifying "Just chiming in to say that I would also really like this feature" as rude. Yes, it is passive aggression, but it is better than active aggression and still provides a bit of valuable information. Open source at its best is like a swarm of locusts devouring the problem domain and for this to work information must flow from users back to developers.
Oh, and thanks for your open source work, burntsushi!