These are sort of ancient (two and a half years old), but I just ran across them today and found them to be emblematic of a cultural defect that plagues many open source projects. These are a couple of feature requests (for the same feature) filed against the file-transfer utility FileZilla:
#2648: Feature request: Support Amazon S3 (closed)
#2741: Feature request: Amazon S3 (closed)
How many things are wrong with this? The fact that the person who shut down the feature request did so unilaterally, immediately, and with absolutely no discussion? The fact that the person used a pseudonym that doesn’t link back to any kind of profile or policy, so there is no way to get context on who this person is or why they made their decision? Or the arrogant tone of the response, which almost ensures that the people who took the trouble to file these feature requests will never do so for this project again?
For commercial products, feature requests are gold. Clearly, for some open-source projects, feature requests are an annoyance at best. It may be possible that FileZilla’s mission is “support dessicated IETF and W3C standards only,” but there’s no way for a civilian user to know that. Most civilians look at FileZilla’s mission as “transfer files from one place to another.” In that context, this kind of feature request is not unreasonable, particularly since many other file-transfer utilities (including the commercial product Transmit, which I use on OS X) have supported Amazon S3 for some time. If it’s really unreasonable to support a mode of file transfer because it wasn’t part of an IETF standard codified in the 1980s, then I have a new feature request for you: plugins. Just like Firefox does. Duh.
Ultimately, the technical solution to the problem isn’t really the issue here. Maybe providing this feature is too hard or outside the scope of the project’s mandate. But if that’s the case, then say that (and take a second to link to more information about your rationale). If somebody who worked for me provided such glib, dismissive responses to a feature request, they would be fired. The fact that we’re probably dealing with a volunteer here is not the issue. The fact that FileZilla is a free/open source project should also not make a difference. The snotty attitude (for this and many other open-source projects) poisons the ecosystem and ensures that the software remains second-rate.
Your open-source project is not your fiefdom.
I love this and completely agree! To be fair, this isn’t the case with all open source projects, Cyber Duck (which I use occasionally if Transmit or Forklift won’t do something I need it to do (which is practically never these days)) has supported S3 and the Rackspace Cloud offerings practically from the beginning – probably because the project has different goals — but your point remains completely and utterly sound.
The issue I often have with open source software and open source communities is that many (not all, but many) want to have things both ways. They want to be considered just as good (if not better) than the non-open source equivalents and they want to be respected and treated with the same amount of reverence, yet they also want to pull the “volunteers make this — fork the code, patch it yourself or shut the hell up” card. You can’t have it both ways. It’s even more clear in projects like Filezilla (and most OSS projects) where you have a clear project leader and maintainer. That means that even if you had the ability to make changes, if they aren’t going to be accepted, you have to create your own trunk copy and maintain all the changes yourself. If you have to do that much work, you might as well either make the whole thing yourself or pay for a project that will look at integrating what you need.
I would be much happier if the double-speak would just stop. If you want to be considered a professional project — open source or not — then act like it. If you can’t handle that and want to just offer stuff for anyone to take and offer fixes back to, then own that and be honest about being a hobby project. If that distinction is made, then I won’t get upset if my feature request is ignored. However, don’t tell me you are just as good as X if you aren’t willing to take the lump X takes.
But, but.. Filezilla is an FTP client! Amazon S3 doesn’t use FTP. Asking FileZilla to support S3 is like asking it to support WebDAV, or Windows filesharing, or some other non-sequitor protocol.
Agreed the responses are short and rude. But that’s kind of the deal with unsupported open source projects. Every feature request is generating unpaid work for the project maintainer, afterall.
So then do you think a web browser shouldn’t be capable of downloading files (or playing media, etc.) because it’s really only supposed to be an “HTML client”? Of course not; it does more than that because people want it to. (And anyway, why should an end user need to know what “FTP” even means? That’s just an implementation detail; civilians just want it to transfer files.)
If there’s a need to be ideologically pure regarding web standards (or regarding support of commercial platforms, as I suspect is the real issue here) then the technically correct solution would be to provide a plug-in architecture, as Firefox does. Then these petty little debates could be sidestepped.