I'm telecommuting for a very large corporation as a senior developer for over 6 months now. I've had great success in driving the team into a direction which I feel is best for specific projects and the team as a whole.
I think the telecommute aspect is really a non-issue for some people. Companies would be wise to consider it for the low overhead.
I guess they want to hire a programmer who would refuse to find the simplest solution to the problem but rather obfuscate it, making maintainability a nightmare.
People who receive free software really have no right to complain about it, if it isn't working as they want it to. They didn't pay dime for it. Either donate money to the project or scratch your own itch. It's not the job the the original developer to spend all of his/her time fixing other people's problems.
This is a terrible attitude and one that I'm fairly certain is not shared by the best open source developers.
If you publish some code and go around claiming it does this and that, you are absolutely responsible for making good on those claims. Your reputation is at stake. How much you are getting paid is irrelevant. Besides, there are plenty of indirect ways to profit from making free software.
Also, there are implicit claims in every piece of software that doesn't say otherwise, namely that it is secure, won't trash your data, follows best practices, is not full of bugs, etc.
If you want to publish "as is" software, that's fine, but it should be made explicity clear to what degree you stand behind the quality of your code.
Users have no business complaining because you won't add some feature they came up with or your pre-release version isn't solid. But it is quite reasonable to complain if an open source project does not live up to its own pretenses.
I think you point it out well. Users have no business complaining because you won't add some feature they came up with. What if that feature is something the user believes is very important to the software, but you think it's a complete waste of your time to even bother to add or maintain it?
That's what this whole Capistrano situation seems like to me (sadly, I didn't even think cap worked on windows). People are irate because a project is dropping support for a platform it never seemed to work well on to begin with. Have the developers ever promised windows support? I always thought their main claim was that it's a tool to automate deploying (mostly rails) apps, and I think it works well in that regard. I didn't think those promises extended to platform support as well.
Given the informal nature of software development, there are going to be a lot of grey areas when it comes to implicit standards and best practices. But it's the principle that matters. Some people believe that open source can do no wrong. I think that belittles open source.
As for this case.. well, Capistrano is a Ruby lib and Ruby libs tend to work on any platform Ruby does, unless otherwise specified. Plus, it used to be supported, which means people invested their time, thinking it would continue to be. It's a weak complaint but it deserves at least a little recognition.
But the attitude bothers me more than the action. Read that message again and then look at this sunshine enema: http://www.capify.org/
Can you put that site online and then claim you're not beholden to anyone? Questionable.
Maybe this is a difference in expectations, but I don't expect a platform to be supported forever, nor do I expect support for a platform when not specified, by anyone. When I looked at the "sunshine enema", I saw a tool for a specific purpose and not much else, certainly not anything about what platform the tool supported which could wait until I read the install/download pages. What I read in the message was someone who was stuck doing something he didn't like, and he was asking for people to do precisely what he did with Capistrano: step up and scratch their own itches, something further helped by Capistrano being an open source project with a current release that still works fine with Windows. I didn't see someone who should have been beholden to anyone otherwise. I also don't see that as an OSS project doing wrong, I think it's reasonable given the situation and this certainly does not have to end here in this way.
For what it's worth, what would bother me is if this wasn't explicitly announced and the dev just didn't feel like working on the project anymore, or if it was a core feature of the tool that was going to be ignored in the future. Now that's something to complain about, and then go do something about if it mattered that much to me.
I've personally been in a similar hellhole of a situation (who hasn't?) doing some dev work for a nonprofit where less than 5% of the users both by number and usage completely wasted my time trying to convince me I should bring back support of older browsers and platforms for absolutely no legitimate reason other than a lack of willingness to upgrade on their part, even though the nonprofit had existing volume and discounted licenses that would effectively make the software free for them. Make a lazy <5% happy by doing LOTS of extra work possibly eschewing working on features for the other >95%, and still deliver what may be a subpar experience (think windows 98 when everyone else is running Vista) while billing them for it at the same time? No thank you.
It's really surprising how many people don't understand this. I hang out in a support channel for an open source app, and people are downright offended when I tell them that whatever feature they want they'll have to implement themselves because all the people capable of working on the project are uninterested or too busy to do anything, and there's a longer list of more important fixes/features that are wanted. Not just a "oh, I understand", but an outright "what the fuck? I don't know how to code", "this 'community' is BS", "what a frigid bitch..." and more. All because I told them that the app was open source so they should consider doing it themselves.
(Funnily enough, there's a competing app that is not open source or free, and they're still not doing a great job of updating the app and adding requested features for paid customers either..)
Anyway, my two cents is that people shouldn't expect donations to make the developer(s) scratch their itches. A donation is a donation. Maybe some devs and projects would be more willing to look into things for you after one, but unless they explicitly have such a policy, I wouldn't expect it to happen.
