I don’t think I’d ever complain directly to the maintainer. I often do find instructions that are essentially The Rest of the Fucking Owl but you go to the community for help and then give up when 90% of them act like you are an idiot for even asking.
I am indeed seeing this with increasing frequency. Just take a look at threads about the Lemmy devs for examples. An increasing number of people seem to feel entitled to be treated not just like customers but as also as stakeholders/PMs for software that was gifted to the community.
As for how to try to change this direction, I think ELI5 on what FLOSS is and how it is governed, as well as how to be a good member of the community, whether as a contributor or otherwise, is probably the way to go.
I’ve had tails “kill” a few USB drives. By that I mean windows wouldn’t recognize the drive with explorer and I had to use diskpart to reformat it, and the drive was fine. I assume this user doesn’t know that, but I think back then I just googled “windows won’t see usb” and got the answer so they should get good.
Windows refuses to recognize anything except the first partition on any storage device that it classifies as “removable”, so this tracks. Just zero the partition table, and Windows will offer to format it like it wants on next plug.
Fair point. An they managed to get their email delivered on that newsletter announce mailing list (Which I expected to be moderated). Not sure how that could happen.
What’s the issue with just ignoring them? I really don’t think making open-source software intentionally obscure because annoying people exist is a great idea. Ultimately we want more people to use FOSS instead of corporate software.
It takes time and energy to ignore them and only them specifically. They need to be filtered out, bug tickets closed and cleared out of otherwise useful channels. The alternative is you just ignore everybody interacting with the project, but that’s not a good solution.
That could get rather annoying. Imagine if when you installed your distro everything was compiled from source (I apologise if you use Gentoo or LFS), it would take a lot longer.
Also people could still just upload a binary to various package managers (assuming the source is available).
Not only is it normalized, but it’s being weaponized. See, for example, the recent XZ backdoor which was equal parts hacking and a psi-op against the maintainer.
Add comment