The open source community is sometimes its own enemy

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

This is sad on several levels:

I’m considering stepping down from maintaining Capistrano at all, if I had to pick on a shortlist of reasons, it’d be:

I don’t use Rails all that much anymore, and many of the problems people report with Cap are really problems of Rails (i.e the entire manifest/asset pipeline disaster). When people have problems, I’m not equipped to diagnose what might be going wrong, as I simply don’t deploy that way. My rails projects are all Rails 4 with no assets, or they are Rails 3 with the most standard

I’ve rewritten Capistrano and it’s now a better tool, but I too cowardly to release it and make it mainstream, as Im afraid it’ll destroy whatever good will for open source I have left when the flood of support questions inevitably comes in, followed by all the people who are unhappy with what I’ve built and feel obliged to tell me how bad I am at software.

On Hacker News, some people point out all that is sad about this:

I just wanted to point out how poisonous our community is. It’s something that I’ve been struggling with for a long time, and trying to slowly change.
The fact that people read this article, and don’t feel the need to mention his fear of releasing software just shows how broken things are. It shouldn’t be an accepted fact of open source that if you release new code that might be backwards incompatible, you get vitriol for it.
His quote:
… but I too cowardly to release it and make it mainstream, as Im afraid it’ll destroy whatever good will for open source I have left when the flood of support questions inevitably comes in, followed by all the people who are unhappy with what I’ve built and feel obliged to tell me how bad I am at software.

Post external references

  1. 1
    https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/capistrano/nmMaqWR1z84
  2. 2
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6504645
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