14 Jul
2014
14 Jul
'14
12:15 p.m.
On Sat, Jul 12, 2014 at 10:45:55AM -0400, Sean Caron wrote:
On Sat, Jul 12, 2014 at 10:07 AM, Peter Corlett
<abuse at cabal.org.uk> wrote:
> So what you're saying is that you want to butt into a busy community to ask
> them for help, but aren't prepared to actually participate or give back? And
> you then wonder why they have their mailing lists configured to discourage
> this behaviour?
Oh for God's sake... I am so dismayed by the
amount of ragging I see on this
list... people seem so much less civil than they did 15 years ago. So, Peter,
I suppose you are just so brilliant and your timelines are so unconstrained
that you can figure out every problem ever laid in front of you without ever
having had to ask a more senior colleague, a friend, or even a random person
on an Internet list or board for advice?
I am certainly sufficiently "brilliant" that I appreciate that random people on
the Internet are answering my questions out of kindness and I am not entitled
to demand that they arrange to make it even easier for me to fire questions at
them.
In practice, I pre-emptively subscribe to mailing lists likely to be of
interest and automatically file them into folders which will pile up with
message until I have a quiet moment to rifle through them. When I do so, I get
to see which questions others are asking and pick up nuggets of information and
novel problem-solving approaches that I would have never known about had I just
fired questions into the ether. Why, sometimes I become familiar enough with
the project that I'm qualified to answer questions and contribute back!
Or maybe your site just shells out the big bucks for
100% commercial software
and you can just pick up the phone and dial for help? Maybe you don't even
work in IT ops?? Because what you are saying is pretty asinine and reflects a
low level of understanding.
I wear many hats, but at present I am a software developer who occasionally
gets involved in the ops side. I work for part of the UK government on a
somewhat domain-specific application which we release as Open Source. We do
that because we would like other parts to save taxpayer money by using it
rather than initiating their own duplicate projects. Additionally, because
there are no licence fees, it can be deployed widely in foreign aid projects.
You're likely not the target market, but you're still welcome to use the
software gratis. Want to ask for help or raise a support request? No problem,
but it has to be squeezed in with all of our other work and spitting your dummy
about how it doesn't fit *your* workflow is liable to get you prioritised
somewhere below giving the office cat a bath.
Likewise if we want support for Open Source that we're using, we get to play by
that project's rules. If it's a bit of a chore to get help or it's not
forthcoming, that's somewhat unfortunate, but it's also our problem and not
theirs.
Anyway, how many lives do you expect your current project to save?