

Octave dev demands money to release bugfix that he already wrote - willvarfar
https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?37411#comment3

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darklajid
Misleading.

Dev requests a non-zero tip as sign of appreciation for fixing a rare and
obscure bug in 6 hours, for a minority. For a tip over a certain threshold he
offered to rework that existing fix (aka invest more time) to include it into
the next stable/support release instead of in v-next.

(For the lazy people:He did exactly that after receiving a 75 USD gift
certificate for Amazon)

Now, why is this title (to my non-native reading comprehension skills)
negative, if patio11 is (again, and probably rightfully so) repeating his
mantra of charging a higher rate in a sibling thread? 75 USD seems quite a
good deal for 'someone works 6+ hours to fix a tricky bug that has a trivial
workaround and is rare to begin with', right?

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Yver
This doesn't shock me in the slightest. It's (apparently) a fairly esoteric
bug, and the developer openly wonders whether anybody actually care about it
being fixed quickly. For that reason, he asked for a proof in the form of one
donation of $1 or more. That's a cheap way to test whether _anyone_ cares
about it.

In a somewhat related fashion, I have a similar system that I apply to myself
on some of my hobby projects. For the more serious ones, I aim to achieve
near-100% code coverage in unit tests. One of the side effects is that
everytime that I ponder adding a feature not out of need but out of curiosity,
challenge or completeness, I ask myself: "do I care enough about it to write
tests for it?" It's basically a litmus test for keeping bloat at bay.

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drcube
Don't like it? Spend six hours and fix it yourself. This guy is well within
his rights here.

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darrenkopp
Well, he's demanding any non-zero donation, so, it could be done for $1. I
don't see how this is really newsworthy at all.

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benth
He asked, not demanded, and he was going to release it eventually anyway.

~~~
moonboots
I didn't get the impression that the developer would release the fixes without
a donation.

~~~
ryankey
"It will thus have to wait until we can make another major release."

It is said in the part about breaking API that it will just have to wait
unless someone wants to pay him for the development fix or for him to make a
fix worthy of the stable updates.

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tylerlh
Seems like an extremely reasonable request from the developer to see if anyone
actually gives a crap about what he's doing. Good on him.

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benologist
Great way to balance the demands of the minority against the billion other
things that affect the majority.

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quantumandan
One dev to another, you're a whiny little bitch.

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Evbn
I do the same thing, every second Friday. If I don't get paid, I stop working.
Even worse, I don't even _start_ working unless I have a pledge from someone
to give me money in 2 weeks or less. Hold 'em hostage, show 'em whose boss

But yeah, these open source guys have a lot of nerve, not giving away stuff
for free. How am I supposed to run a business with suppliers who can
arbitrarily raise prices for future supply?

