About six months ago, I wrote a piece about the state of open-source commercialization that garnered some notice. Almost immediately after that, Hacker News featured a problematic piece of prose on the front page. The title is “Fix it, Fork it, F*ck off” (censorship is mine). I think this is a great sample of where OSS is failing commercially and as a movement. A lot of the attention in OSS goes into the code of conduct policies (which are important), but not enough goes into what it takes to build a successful open-source project. It isn’t just the coding. I’d argue that coding is often less important than this.
The Clash of Entitlement
I understand where the author is coming from. He’s writing from frustration. We put a lot of work into our OSS project, and an entitled end user can be difficult. I agree some people go over the line, but in my experience, this is less than 0.1% of complaints. It’s rare to have a truly toxic user.