Comments on: Nobody Said That Open Source Projects Were All About Customer Service

By: jeffrey

jeffrey — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 22:28:49 +0000

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.

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By: Nelson

Nelson — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 21:58:42 +0000

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.

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By: Christina Warren

Christina Warren — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 21:17:50 +0000

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.

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