> realign the experiences to those that provide the most value to users
Aside from the fact that nobody actually takes what Microsoft says seriously (they are professional bullshitters [with full time PR firms perfecting their bullshit] and have been for 30 years), it's funny that even this line can be reasonably interpreted as pushing more blatant nonsense onto consumers as long as it's what C-suite types think they should be paying for.
Notice that what provides the most value to users is not at all necessarily the same thing as'what our users want'. And it isn't even clear that Microsoft is thinking of consumer users here as opposed to corporate users and corporate IT departments, which are in most cases these days their actually direct customers. Most home user consumers don't pay for Windows directly.
It's hard to explain to people how insane things can get when you give away your work and time for free, in the hope that it will benefit people. Some things I've experienced:
- People yelling at me in DM's when I didn't edit a podcast for community meetups in time
- Alcoholics joining in on FOSS meetups because they wanted attention
- People in the community getting spammed with crypto scams impersonating me that I had to answer to
- My work being whitelabeled and sold to investors to raise money to the extent people accuse me of stealing from others
- Smear campaigns making their way to my employer when I decided not to work on a particular open source project anymore
- I gave away hardware to community members; the reward was tech support requests
- Suicidal community members using me as a therapist (they claim I "saved their life"), followed by taking private (non FOSS) source code and giving it to to my competitors to advance their own tech careers
This is just scratching the surface of the things I've had to deal with in my open source work. I've learned to draw much stricter boundaries.
If you are going to get into open source communities you should go in with a plan for how you're going to deal with these kinds of things when they happen to you.
I'm sorry to hear about your experiences. I find it hard enough to deal with pushy people who have mismatched expectations (and yes, I'm not proud of it but at times I have been an entitled user.) I don't think what you're describing is limited to open source software though. Any time you make yourself available to the general population you're going to attract the full spectrum of human behavior. I guess the trick is to not make your project a honeypot for the debilitating stuff.
> I've learned to draw much stricter boundaries.
Could you elaborate on what has worked for you?
I imagine people who work in customer service have strategies too.
Unfortunately, a lot of this behavior is very common in online communities generally. Addicts or mentally ill folk with no outlet offline take it online to some authority member in the community, or really anyone who will spare them a second… the things this leads to can be absolutely insane. Sad all-around.
You just have to stand your ground. This is true for anyone in any leadership position, whether you run an open-source project, a business, or anywhere else. Don't be a pushover.
There are other awful oss things out there too that I won't share because they would dox me.
I agree the key is boundaries. You will not be famous with them but you will enjoy your hobby and have a greater chance of forming real connections with them.
Once chat bots started yelling at me to update my repos, or submitting trash PRS, I made a new rule for myself. If someone wants a change I will let them make a pr and will read it when I want too.
So sorry to the million dollar teams making tens of million off my work but won't hire me for a job but my life is way more important no matter how much you yell.
My mistake was, I assumed it wouldn't be that grimey. It turns out there are all types of scams and schemes.
I had someone pretend to interview me. During the interview they used vague language about one of my more tightly licensed packages asking if they could use it. I said no but if they gave me a role I liked I could agree with it. They cut off the "interview" immediately.
I also had multiple job offers not let me fill out my prior art.
It's slimy out there. Now that people can send code into LLMs and launder it I don't think it's very hopeful for individuals to enforce a license against any company making any money, and it's not worth it if the company isn't.
Allow me to auto-translate my comment which initially was a response to "How can an ordinary developer get involved in the open source community, and is it worth it?" article (in Russian), because it describes how these different social expectations arise from the start.
It's very long and poorly structured, but it's valuable from my standpint. Don't read if you value your time.
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Your article only covers the most well-known, largest, and established projects that meet both the technical definition of open source (open source code, under a free license) and the social definition (code is publicly available to everyone, free of charge, with both bug fixes and simple bug reports encouraged), and are also economically attractive to businesses (more on that later).
There may be a couple of hundred such successful projects. A drop in the ocean of open source.
From my experience, I believe that the lack of mention of this distinction between technical and social open source is the main cause of disagreements, disputes, and, ultimately, burnout due to misaligned social expectations.
This can even be seen in your screenshot of AWS vs. FFmpeg in the article: the author of the FFmpeg Twitter account repeatedly believes that corporations owe something since they use open source code, even though the license doesn't obligate them to do so. Moreover, when Google launched its fuzzing program (objectively the most advanced in the industry), which automatically identifies and reports security issues (which is a significant contribution in itself), FFmpeg wanted not just code fixes but also Google to pay them for the maintainers' time!
We came up with LICENSE.md, but we didn't think of SOCIAL.md.
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In other words, it's a digital version of the tragedy of the commons, in which the cycle repeats itself from project to project:
* Initially, some technical open-source software is created, under a free license, to solve a specific problem, either for oneself or for a limited number of people.
* First, a few users appear, saying it would be nice to have such-and-such a feature—the authors implement it, since it's not that difficult and generally useful.
* Then, as users grow, handling their requests becomes tedious—often, features are offered that the author will never use, or support for a platform requires a significant amount of code that the author isn't interested in, and they can't test the software on.
* The worst thing is when the software becomes popular (especially if it works reliably and is unique in its kind) and some other large project starts using it. Congratulations, your project is now a public good. In a single day, the burden of social responsibility for any bug or security issue falls on the shoulders of the author/maintainer, because it now affects not only the initial limited user base, but potentially millions of users of other software that relies on both your code and you directly.
Until the final stage, you could sit down, think, and determine what exactly you're doing, and take steps to prevent this or that scenario (or, conversely, develop deliberately toward that scenario). But once that happens, it's too late to do anything. You've effectively become a provider of social software, with all its advantages and disadvantages, and it will be very psychologically scary to say "no" to people and somehow get out of this situation in the short term.
FFmpeg, for example, still refuses to recognize itself as social software, despite being used by hundreds of large projects and being the default distribution on desktop Linux systems.
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How is this expressed? (spoiler)
FFmpeg's stated mission on its website is as follows:
FFmpeg is the leading multimedia framework, capable of decode, encode, transcode, mux, demux, stream, filter, and play pretty much anything humans and machines have created. It supports the most obscure ancient formats to the cutting edge. It doesn't matter if they were designed by some standards committee, the community, or a corporation.
This conflicts with the security needs of a wide range of users: the more multimedia formats supported, the wider the attack vectors available for users of any software that uses ffmpeg: video players, browsers, instant messengers, preview generators, etc. A security flaw in an old codec could lead to browser compromise if a user simply visits a page with a malicious video.
This isn't a hypothetical danger—errors in file format demuxers and multimedia codecs are among the most commonly exploited. Here's a very recent example (Dolby decoder on Android), and here's a more high-profile and complex one (JBIG2 to PDF on iOS/macOS).
It's assumed that programmers in third-party projects using the library have sufficient knowledge to correctly and securely configure the library in their software, as FFmpeg's primary goal is to ensure playback of a wide range of files, not to address the needs of developers who use the library as a dependency or the end users of that third-party software.
According to the ffmpeg Twitter account, its use on AWS isn't a sign of the library's success or quality, something to be proud of, but rather a significant psychological burden for the project, as the company provides neither funding nor human resources. One can only expect even more tickets in the event of problems, and a lack of fixes for bugs, which Amazon fixes only internally, rather than contributing back to the project.
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If a project doesn't have any obvious distinguishing features that indicate it's not social, it's assumed to be so by default.
If a project is on GitHub, has a readme and an issues section, the average user or programmer will assume the author is writing for people, for society, for everyone around them, interested in developing the project, adding new features (especially those I need), and improving it in every way for the benefit of all users. After all, if that's not the case, why even publish it?
I used to have to explain the problem and the difference to an outraged public, but recently I came across an article by Jeffrey Paul https://sneak.berlin/20250720/the-agpl-is-nonfree/ comparing open-source code to a gift! My explanation boiled down to:
"Don't like the gift, it doesn't suit you? Throw it out and forget it!"
Money.
If you're making something that doesn't feel like a product (for example, a library that solves a specific problem that a non-programmer wouldn't be able to use, or even need), it would be a great success to get anything at all.
Have you ever considered donating (money, improved documentation, or code fixes) to such widely used and significant projects as glibc (a C library), FriBidi (a library for working with right-to-left scripts: Arabic/Hebrew), or libusb (a cross-platform low-level library for working with USB devices)?
Each of these libraries is extremely popular and has a user base of billions of devices. They're usually the ones people think about when something isn't working.
When I read articles like this one (remember the title: "How Can an Ordinary Developer Get Into Open Source and Is It Worth It?" The examples include free products created by corporations, or commercial products initially oriented toward open source, but open source), and I always wonder: what does open source even mean to the author? It seems to me that today it's analogous to an "open source business," with a hierarchy a la the cream of society (whom we'll be writing about, where it's prestigious to contribute your code) and some homeless people with their libraries at the bottom, who aren't even worth touching.
>>(quote from the article) I personally met someone who dragged out a PR for a week because he didn't understand what a CLA was or how to sign it.
Do you understand what a CLA is? Perhaps you should explain it to the reader, otherwise they might not want to contribute to such a project after the explanation? Perhaps the idea of transferring their copyrights to a corporation isn't appealing to them at all? Or maybe there's a code maintenance obligation for X years, and they're not even aware of it?
The presence of a CLA, if it mentions transfer of rights, usually means that for once, it's safe to shift responsibility for solving your problem to the maintainers by creating an issue, rather than digging around in the code. People won't complain, because they're working on the project for money and that's their job!
You're expecting a reward for your charitable work. A grocer faces its own hardship too (the late night alcoholic who trashes one of your aisle), but it's made bearable by the flow of income this provides.
Get paid. Like seriously. At least make the companies pay. You seem to be in exceptionnally successful with your project and well connected, why not try to start a kind of open-source consortium with other maintainers and companies to try to get some momentum into normalizing the fact companies should pay for the libraries they use. Surely, any company can throw 10k a year into open source projects, there must be a solution that doesn't leave people like you disgruntled.
And yet it is an expectation, a wishful fantasy, that will lead to endless loops of disappointment unless we let go of it, face reality, and deal with it in other more productive ways. Not all people will always act “civilized”.
This is interesting, but unfortunately it's a gradient on an infinite game of cat and mouse.
If blocking doesn't work, there will be phone verification. If that doesn't work you're gonna need to get orbed. If that doesn't work, you're gonna need to drink the verification cans. Or they will just kill the free tiers. There is no free lunch.
I don't use Warp, but it seems to me they did something cool (terminal app), pivoted that attention into a profitable AI play, but a lot of people just wanted the terminal app.
Now nobody knows what Warp is anymore, because they want to be an Agentic IDE and that's not what the users want.
Do I have that right?
I don't see what the point of this OpenWarp fork is though, other than adding more provider support. Couldn't that just be upstreamed?
Yeah that's pretty much my opinion on warp. I really liked some of the ideas used for the actual terminal side of it. The IDE-like prompt and completions, file tree, vertical tabs, etc. I mostly just wanted a terminal that was trying something new UI/UX wise.
Nowadays it just tries to do so much and seems overwhelming. I'll probably still give it a try once it supports Nushell, but I'll need to spend some time disabling a ton of the extra features.
Yeah, pretty much. I used it, but one day I opened Warp and it looked like a half-baked Cursor.
I liked it for the ability to type "git one-liner logs with date and author, no messages" and get the output without having to remember or look for actual formatting parameters.
I also get that's too niche of an use case, and not sustainable as a business. But still.
FWIW, an open-source clone of that earlier version of Warp called Wave is out there. It seems to be actively maintained and works quite well, in my experience.
I really like Warp, because it looks and behaves the way I want a terminal emulator to. I disable all the AI features though because I don’t find them useful.
If this community fork were to, for example remove all of the AI features, it would be valuable to me.
I really liked it, even though I didn't use any of the AI stuff. Then they just keep pushing the AI harder and harder, and I finally stopped and figured out how to configure the Win11 Terminal app "good enough" and dropped it.
What was the terminal app though and what was special about it that Ghostty didn't already provide?
edit: Found this one article (via google) that talks about the terminal. I guess it was a terminal that you could "prompt" to do things and it would figure out the shell commands.
If I recall correctly, warp is older than ghostty. Warp became popular because it was one of the well maintained rust-based terminals, and it had some simple AI features like completions and natural language command recognition. That’s why I started using it at least and I liked the dark theme better than that of any other terminal. I barely used the AI features initially but my company pays for it if I want to use it so I started using it occasionally.
Warp is older than ghostly and warp provides much more functions. Not only AI stuff but better editing of the shell (yea, I’m sure there is a way to get it in ghostty too), a built in run book where you can save commands (yes, you can say it should not live in the terminal)
Do you need all of them? Maybe not. Maybe. I used warp in the past (before AI) but now just Ghostty. But it required more customization to achieve just some of the stuff warp does.
- The _block_ system where you could navigate up and down without scrolling the whole buffer rigidly
- The tabbing system that actually works and doesn't feel clunky
- The command prediction
- The workflows (but that's now pretty much dead unless you really do not use AI)
I much rather would use Warp now because I am looking for an agentic IDE, not looking to replace my terminal which I use daily. I don't want to use Cursor or VSCode because it's Electron and can be slow, while Warp has their own custom Rust-based GUI based off an early version of Zed's GPUI so it should similarly be much faster.
The AI stuff is layered on in a way where it doesn't get in the way. Very useful for command completion and stuff like that, without having to open claude.
Yeah that's the thing, slight fee vs more annoying site doesn't matter that much. LinkedIn got me a job. Sure I had to give a burner email for them to ddos, but so what. If I were to use another site, it'd be because that's where recruiters are, not cause it's a nicer site.
Anyway if you magically copied the entire LinkedIn network to a clean, no-nonsense site and wanted $5/mo to be active on there during the time I'm seeking a job, I'd pay that. And it'd be more if it had better opportunities. I guess there's LinkedIn Premium, but eh not convinced on that.
[1] https://paulgraham.com/brandage.html
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