this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2024
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I've worked on open source software projects, some of them pretty major. And we had a sort of similar debate. In a non-capitalist software product, the users are not strictly required -- particularly if they aren't paying, you don't really need them. Except that open source has this user->contributor treadmill that requires that some users become contributors in order for a project to grow. So you want to be as pro-user as possible, hoping and dreaming you'll get patches out of the blue some day, or similar.
But what happens when your users become hostile or entitled. What if they do the equivalent of calling tech support and demanding satisfaction. The customer is always right, right? How much time and effort can you devote to them without detracted from what you were doing (coding). Eventually as a product grows, the number of hostile users grows. What do you do to manage this at scale?
Suddenly you're facing the same problem Home Depot faces in your article, except your capital is not measured in dollars but time, motivation, mood... And you start putting up barriers in a similar fashion.
The full quote is actually “The customer is always right in matters of taste.” Which basically means that you should sell what your customers want to buy- not that customers can demand whatever they want 😄
What's the point of writing software without users? Even if you're the only user, there needs to be a user, else it's a waste of time and effort. If you're just playing, studying, or whatever, why even publish and open source it? Users are a necessity for any software.
The other issues of growing FLOSS projects are a serious issue though.
Not to be argumentative, and I generally see your point :)
I do occasionally write software that will have zero users -- not even myself. Because it's fun to play with the code. "I wonder if I can prototype a openscad type thingy using Python set syntax..." Or whatever. It's the equivalent of sitting in front of a piano and creating song fragments to pass the time.
Naturally the benefit here is that you're developing skills, passing time in an entertaining fashion, and working the ole grey matter.
Software developers excel at creating ever-more-elaborate ways to heat up a CPU.
CC: @[email protected]
I've had similar experiences to what [email protected] describes. The problem comes more from the expectations that users have as consumers, which they bring with them to open source projects from general culture, not necessarily the existence of the users themselves. Some of those users for big open source projects are often corporations, to boot.