This triggers me hard.
> One source of toxic behavior is entitled users.
It's hard to explain to people how insane things can get when you give away your work and time for free, in the hope that it will benefit people. Some things I've experienced:
- People yelling at me in DM's when I didn't edit a podcast for community meetups in time
- Alcoholics joining in on FOSS meetups because they wanted attention
- People in the community getting spammed with crypto scams impersonating me that I had to answer to
- My work being whitelabeled and sold to investors to raise money to the extent people accuse me of stealing from others
- Smear campaigns making their way to my employer when I decided not to work on a particular open source project anymore
- I gave away hardware to community members; the reward was tech support requests
- Suicidal community members using me as a therapist (they claim I "saved their life"), followed by taking private (non FOSS) source code and giving it to to my competitors to advance their own tech careers
If you are going to get into open source communities you should go in with a plan for how you're going to deal with these kinds of things when they happen to you.
I'm sorry to hear about your experiences. I find it hard enough to deal with pushy people who have mismatched expectations (and yes, I'm not proud of it but at times I have been an entitled user.) I don't think what you're describing is limited to open source software though. Any time you make yourself available to the general population you're going to attract the full spectrum of human behavior. I guess the trick is to not make your project a honeypot for the debilitating stuff.
> I've learned to draw much stricter boundaries.
Could you elaborate on what has worked for you?
I imagine people who work in customer service have strategies too.
Unfortunately, a lot of this behavior is very common in online communities generally. Addicts or mentally ill folk with no outlet offline take it online to some authority member in the community, or really anyone who will spare them a second… the things this leads to can be absolutely insane. Sad all-around.
There are other awful oss things out there too that I won't share because they would dox me.
I agree the key is boundaries. You will not be famous with them but you will enjoy your hobby and have a greater chance of forming real connections with them.
Once chat bots started yelling at me to update my repos, or submitting trash PRS, I made a new rule for myself. If someone wants a change I will let them make a pr and will read it when I want too.
So sorry to the million dollar teams making tens of million off my work but won't hire me for a job but my life is way more important no matter how much you yell.
i think more people should be using licenses that prohibit commercial use without financial support. you’ve already got a user base. make them pay
My mistake was, I assumed it wouldn't be that grimey. It turns out there are all types of scams and schemes.
I had someone pretend to interview me. During the interview they used vague language about one of my more tightly licensed packages asking if they could use it. I said no but if they gave me a role I liked I could agree with it. They cut off the "interview" immediately.
I also had multiple job offers not let me fill out my prior art.
It's slimy out there. Now that people can send code into LLMs and launder it I don't think it's very hopeful for individuals to enforce a license against any company making any money, and it's not worth it if the company isn't.
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You just have to stand your ground. This is true for anyone in any leadership position, whether you run an open-source project, a business, or anywhere else. Don't be a pushover.
I wonder if the distribution of Weirdly Entitled users is higher in some groups vs others?
ie JS/Node seems to attract more newbie users, so I wonder if that correlates with higher incidents of this
That's with the thought that maybe it's newbie users mostly being that source.
Well this just made me feel a whole lot better (similar experience, though not as hardcore). Good lord.
Just open any topic around systemd or Wayland here and see just how insanely unhinged people get at abusing OSS developers.
At this time the amount of toxic bile spewed at the OSS project I work on outpaces any good coverage by about 2:1.
people get really weird hate boners about systemd and anything else Lennart Poettering has made. it’s kinda pathetic
This is awful.
I'd shut the project(s) down after a fraction of that. Karens can keep developing it themselves.
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> when you give away your work and time for free
> I gave away ... the reward was
You're expecting a reward for your charitable work. A grocer faces its own hardship too (the late night alcoholic who trashes one of your aisle), but it's made bearable by the flow of income this provides.
Get paid. Like seriously. At least make the companies pay. You seem to be in exceptionnally successful with your project and well connected, why not try to start a kind of open-source consortium with other maintainers and companies to try to get some momentum into normalizing the fact companies should pay for the libraries they use. Surely, any company can throw 10k a year into open source projects, there must be a solution that doesn't leave people like you disgruntled.
Civil behavior and thanks isn't a reward. It's the lowest of baselines for being human.
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get paid for your work
especially under capitalism