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431 points dangle1 | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.201s | source
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arp242 ◴[] No.41861943[source]
The trolling was ridiculous. I don't blame them.

It was pretty clear that with "fork" they meant "don't create a WinAmp-ng fork" and not a "fork" in the "send a patch" GitHub sense. It's fine to point out "hey, I think your custom written license may need a bit of work!", but the amount of vitriol and hate over it (including on HN) was just ridiculous.

It was one of those moments I was embarrassed to be posting here.

And yes, they could have done better, sure. But instead of bringing in someone in the community you just chased them away. Well done everyone. Good job. Excellent result. A story to tell the grandchildren.

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freedomben ◴[] No.41862181[source]
My thoughts exactly. It was shocking and appalling to me how people reacted to this effort. Instead of praising them for taking such a big step, the airwaves were saturated with people magnifying every little imperfection and shitting all over them for it.

If anyone is thinking about open sourcing (and/or making source available) their previously closed app, they had better be paying attention to this. The clear message I saw is that open sourcing is not worth it.

And that sucks and is the exact opposite of how it should be. Open sourcing is an amazing gift you can give to humanity, and instead of looking the gift horse in the mouth and bitching about some imperfections, we should have been praising them and thanking them for their generosity, and sending PRs to help fix issues.

The mess resulting from the Winamp open sourcing/source availabling is more on us (the community) than them, IMHO. If we had acted like rational adults instead of emotionally charged children dehumanizing strangers on the internet and shitting all over them, they would have fixed the issues and we'd be in a better place. Instead now, we have nothing. This is why we can't have nice things.

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1. spease ◴[] No.41862880[source]
I’m not too familiar with this situation, but I think one thing that would help Open Source in general is a way to signal what level of user the thing is intended to target.

For instance, is this just something that’s being dumped out on the internet in case someone else finds it useful?

Is it part of your portfolio and intended to showcase your technical skill, but not necessarily be polished from a UX perspective?

Or is it intended to be useful for end users?

Maybe it would be good to have a visually distinct and consistent badge or checklist available for open source projects to communicate the high-level goals so that people’s expectations are set correctly and they know what kind of feedback is inappropriate.

Every project is going to nominally be as-is for obvious liability reasons.

- UX Tier 10 for completely tech-illiterate users

- UX Tier 9 for infrequent mainstream users (do not need to watch a tutorial)

- UX Tier 8 for frequent mainstream users (have watched tutorials)

- UX Tier 7 for power users (need to read the manual)

- UX Tier 6 for sysadmin users (responsible for keeping it running for above users)

- UX Tier 5 for domain specialist users (know the theory behind it)

- UX Tier 4 for developers (read the API reference)

- UX Tier 3 for domain specialist developers (API reference and know the theory)

- UX Tier 2 for project ecosystem developers (know conventions and idiomatic patterns)

- UX Tier 1 for the project team itself (know where the skeletons are buried)

- UX Tier 0 for no further development anticipated