Framework Developer 'Ragequits' Open Source Community, Citing Negative Comments, 'Very Few Provide Help' (theregister.co.uk) 122
The maintainer of the popular Rust web framework Actix has quit the project -- though he's backed off threats to make its code private and delete its repository, instead appointing a new maintainer. "Be a maintainer of large open source project is not a fun task," he'd complained last week on GitHub. "You alway face with rude and hate, everyone knows better how to build software, nobody wants to do home work and read docs and think a bit and very few provide any help...
"You felt betrayed after you put so much effort and then to hear all this shit comments, even if you understand that that is usual internet behavior.... Nowadays supporting actix project is not fun, and be[ing] part of rust community is not fun as well."
The Register reports: Actix Web was developed by Nikolay Kim, who is also a senior software engineer at Microsoft, though the Actix project is not an official Microsoft project. Actix Web is based on Actix, a framework for Rust based on the Actor model, also developed by Kim. The web framework is important to the Rust community partly because it addresses a common use case (development web applications) and partly because of its outstanding performance. For some tests, Actix tops the Techempower benchmarks.
The project is open source and while it is popular, there has been some unhappiness among users about its use of "unsafe" code... Safe code is protected from common bugs (and more importantly, security vulnerabilities) arising from issues like variables which point to uninitialized memory, or variables which are used after the memory allocated to them has been freed, or attempting to write data to a variable which exceeds the memory allocated. Code in Rust is safe by default, but the language also supports unsafe code, which can be useful for interoperability or to improve performance.
There is extensive use of unsafe code in Actix, leading to debate about what should be fixed. Kim was not always receptive to proposed changes... Kim said that he did not ignore or delete issues arbitrarily, but only because he felt he had a better or more creative solution than the one proposed -- while also acknowledging that the "removing issue was a stupid idea." He also threatened to "make [Actix] repos private and then delete them...." Since then, matters have improved. The Github repository was restored and Kim said, "I realized, a lot of people depend on actix. And it would be unfair to just delete repos... I hope new community of developers emerge. And good luck!"
The developer news site DevClass wrote that "The apparent 'ragequit' has prompted questions about the dynamics within the open source community." Over 120 GitHub users have now signed a sympathetic letter to Nikolay from "users, contributors, and followers of your work in the Rust community," saying "We are extremely disappointed at the level of abuse directed towards you."
"Working on open source projects should be rewarding, and your work has empowered thousands of developers across the world to build web services with Rust. It's incredibly tragic for someone who has contributed so much to the community, to be made to feel so unwelcome that they feel that they have no other choice than to leave. This is not the kind of community we want."
"You felt betrayed after you put so much effort and then to hear all this shit comments, even if you understand that that is usual internet behavior.... Nowadays supporting actix project is not fun, and be[ing] part of rust community is not fun as well."
The Register reports: Actix Web was developed by Nikolay Kim, who is also a senior software engineer at Microsoft, though the Actix project is not an official Microsoft project. Actix Web is based on Actix, a framework for Rust based on the Actor model, also developed by Kim. The web framework is important to the Rust community partly because it addresses a common use case (development web applications) and partly because of its outstanding performance. For some tests, Actix tops the Techempower benchmarks.
The project is open source and while it is popular, there has been some unhappiness among users about its use of "unsafe" code... Safe code is protected from common bugs (and more importantly, security vulnerabilities) arising from issues like variables which point to uninitialized memory, or variables which are used after the memory allocated to them has been freed, or attempting to write data to a variable which exceeds the memory allocated. Code in Rust is safe by default, but the language also supports unsafe code, which can be useful for interoperability or to improve performance.
There is extensive use of unsafe code in Actix, leading to debate about what should be fixed. Kim was not always receptive to proposed changes... Kim said that he did not ignore or delete issues arbitrarily, but only because he felt he had a better or more creative solution than the one proposed -- while also acknowledging that the "removing issue was a stupid idea." He also threatened to "make [Actix] repos private and then delete them...." Since then, matters have improved. The Github repository was restored and Kim said, "I realized, a lot of people depend on actix. And it would be unfair to just delete repos... I hope new community of developers emerge. And good luck!"
The developer news site DevClass wrote that "The apparent 'ragequit' has prompted questions about the dynamics within the open source community." Over 120 GitHub users have now signed a sympathetic letter to Nikolay from "users, contributors, and followers of your work in the Rust community," saying "We are extremely disappointed at the level of abuse directed towards you."
"Working on open source projects should be rewarding, and your work has empowered thousands of developers across the world to build web services with Rust. It's incredibly tragic for someone who has contributed so much to the community, to be made to feel so unwelcome that they feel that they have no other choice than to leave. This is not the kind of community we want."
Everybody is like that (Score:1)
everyone knows better how to build software
Any developers who claim their work is "average" instead of gods gift to software is unmotivated and only looking for a 9 to 5 time sink instead of an enjoyable career.
Re:Everybody is like that (Score:5, Interesting)
I must disagree. Many people who believe that their work is "god's gift to software" are actually just suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect. [wikipedia.org] Objectively speaking, confidence is no measure of talent.
In my experience it is also common that authentically talented people suffer from Imposter Syndrome [wikipedia.org], and they wind up being very unsure of their skills even though their skills are top-notch. I just deleted a long paragraph about my experience seeing this in some of our new hires. Long story short: they were over-receptive to criticism from people who knew less than they did....until they started getting some achievements under their belt and realizing what they were capable of accomplishing.
People who put heart into their code tend to write good code....and are the most vulnerable to being hurt by harsh criticism from people who mostly just want to fling shit. Furthermore, in the domain of software development, there are WAY more ways than one to solve a problem. Some people get a religious-level of devotion to their favorite set of design principles, and they see as wrong anything that uses other principles, regardless of how well those other principles may actually fit the problem. Approach-absolutism has generated enough frustration that we have lost several employees over it. And the open source community may have just lost one over it, as well.
My advice is always to judge every problem on a case-by-case basis. One size never fits all.
And the need for a "thick skin" must be balanced by SOME kind of effort to police the on-line community for toxicity, and purge it.
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Pretty sure the OP was being sarcastic.
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If that's the case then it appears that I actually agree with cygnusvis.
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I've been coding for 43 years and I'm well recompensed for it. My code still sucks donkey balls when I first write it.
Good code takes time and effort to make good.
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Re: Everybody is like that (Score:4, Funny)
It's the kind of spec you get if you've got an ass for a client.
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Re:Everybody is like that (Score:4, Insightful)
Different people have different ideas and goals about what is good software. Some write crap but think it's great because they solved the problem quickly and are able to move onto the next task. Others have code that works great but which is difficult for others to understand or modify, leading coworkers to be angry at it (and in my experience, 95% of all work I've done over 30+ years is code maintenance). Others inside on absolutely perfect code that follows that year's fashion, and end up with something over engineered and difficult for to follow, and more time is spent on making the perfect platform or framework than in getting a product out to the customers. And to be honest here, all of them are right, that's all good code for the view they come from.
But I do wish more programmers understood that there are other people out there who will need to look at and modify their code in the future.
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It is "Open Source Code", everyone get's to see the code, whose is in and whose is replaced and whose it out. All professions are competitive, it is in the very nature of capitalism and those who code is best is worth the most, them and they code they could potentially create. So those open source code environments are competitive places, the code competes for inclusions to survive. You just need to take that into account when it set up the system for including code into the project, the coding referee syst
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Didn't always be this way though. Before open source was called open source, there was a wide range of programs with varying quality, and it was accepted. A whole lot of "I learned how to program writing this" style of stuff. Not much competition because everyone had a day job or was a student.
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In my experience it is also common that authentically talented people suffer from Imposter Syndrome [wikipedia.org], and they wind up being very unsure of their skills even though their skills are top-notch
They notice their own mistakes. I dealt with imposter syndrome for several years after graduating. But then I got several opportunities that changed my perspective. Now I'm a senior software engineer because of my constant "keep improving" attitude. I'm still my own worst critic. The worst part is few people can give me useful feedback about how to improve myself, and those people are always busy.
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The latter case is VERY common. You can say all these things are free and open source and take it or leave it but the reality isn't like that. Suddenly everyone insists on using this stuff, you get replaced if you don't or you don't get a job if you're not using this stuff. Oth
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only looking for a 9 to 5 time sink instead of an enjoyable career.
That's exactly what I want at this point.
I'm nearing the end of my career and I have zero interest in hard work, death marches, meetings, deadlines, or working in a "fast-paced, dynamic, ever-changing environment" (as Amazon loves to describe their workplace). Fuuuuuuuuuuuck NO.
Seriously, fuck that. I want a quiet, sleepy little place where I can come in late, leave early, screw off and do my work at a leisurely pace.
And by "work", I mean looking at cat pictures, taking extended lunches, browsing slashdot,
Re: Everybody is like that (Score:2)
I wouldd hazard guess that rust community is extra bad.
Also. Checking it out i just gotta ask if rust is so good etc. .. . why is this project so essential?
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I think it is maybe the fastest web server framework in existence according to various tests. I tried to use it myself to build a simple web server, but the documentation sucks (as he admits). So I gave up on it. Yet another case of a developer who doesn't care whether anyone actually uses his software. He wrote a great framework and so everyone should just figure it out for themselves or read the code themselves and no the code isn't commented. This isn't the 1970s.
Re: Everybody is like that (Score:2)
Oh the âoeyou want better docs, write them yourselfâ guy? I go banned from a GitHub repo for asking for better docs on a part of an api. Actually I got banned after explaining that I would write the docs, but I donâ(TM)t understand the api. Apparently pointing out a fault in the project is a personal attack for some people.
and very few provide any help... (Score:5, Insightful)
and very few provide any help...
I am not one to talk but...
I consider the work people do on other projects that I make use of as "help"... When I look at it that way, lots of people help and hte amount of help is huge...
all the best,
drew
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"If I've seen less than others, it's because I stood in the footprints of giants."
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It's less about help and more about demands I think. People make demands of open source developers and don't help in any way, say by contributing code or even money. They just tell you that your work is shit but for some reason they are bent on using it so you absolutely must fix it for them, and are an idiot for not immediately doing so.
I've had this a lot before and my projects were never anything like as big as this one so I can only imagine how bad it is for him. I've had people alternatively beg and de
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People make demands of open source developers and don't help in any way, say by contributing code or even money.
Yep. I donate to OSS projects to show my appreciation. Not tons of money, but $20 here and there helps. I can afford it and it's good to give back.
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This is very common. Blame the internet and ignore them.
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It's less about help and more about demands I think. People make demands of open source developers and don't help in any way, say by contributing code or even money. They just tell you that your work is shit but for some reason they are bent on using it so you absolutely must fix it for them, and are an idiot for not immediately doing so.
I hear you and do not doubt that happens and sucks when it does happen...
On the other hand, I think that may be a problem I would not mind having with at least one of my projects...
Let's try:
http://www.vassalengine.org/wi... [vassalengine.org]
https://sourceforge.net/projec... [sourceforge.net]
https://youtu.be/0Xg-jYA_xsg [youtu.be]
We shall see....
Would you like to play a game?
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Rust: Teen Angst of Languages. (Score:2, Interesting)
From the "NIH" aspect of it all to the embedded comments on "Why would anyone need to make their code that small". It certainly is an entertaining.
And good luck getting anyone to use any of your projects in the future. I'm not going to build a project on something where the author up and leaves if we don't worship them.
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Yeah, and anyways, you're supposed to be eating your own dog food. In web frameworks that means running a web consulting firm.
Like RubyOnRails. It was always something that they made to service their clients, and they also gave it away as open source because it got them a lot of free advertising, and also lots of donated work. If the lead developer isn't making money off it, how does he know it has the features that people need from a web framework? That's what web frameworks are for, people who make a lot
Pervsely this is a positive story about Rust (Score:3, Interesting)
One of the strange things here is that this story actually shows quite a lot of good behaviour from the Rust community.
If you read the comments on the original github ticket most of them were respectful; one or two were not, and the posters called out. Likewise the comments on the Rust user forum were moderated and generally respectful. The main place that it got personal was on reddit, and even there people tried to pull the situation back. Clearly there was a failing in the Rust community here, but this may be because the Rust community has set itself quite a high bar. Esepcially in comparison to many other parts of the internet, getting rude, abusive and even highly offensive responses is considered normal and something that you have to put up with.
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Yeah the behavior was so good that the developer rage quit and deleted the repo after saying "[he] felt betrayed after you put so much effort and then to hear all this shit comments, even if you understand that that is usual internet behavior.... Nowadays supporting actix project is not fun, and be[ing] part of rust community is not fun as well.". So, um, yeah, completely the opposite of what you are saying.
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A bug got filed. He said it's not a real bug. Bug was demonstrated. He said the solution was boring.
Some asshat insulted him, he deleted the bug report.
In his retirement letter he explained that "boring" was really shorthand for "I want a creative solution involving the unsafe keyword and am going to work on it on my own, thanks for reporting this bug".
Obviously at the time no one knew that's what he
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> If you read the comments on the original github ticket most of them were respectful;
And this exactly the problem with that: it cuts both ways.
The moderation will catch up the rude, entitled, but /genuinely frustrated users/ who don't know how to behave, but all the agenda-driven "safe-practices" cargo-cult pushing trolls will breeze their way through with the "respectful comments", even if they're completely clueless or dishonest. And the poor dev doesn't even have the recourse the tell them to go fuck
Good for him (Score:2)
Declining to engage with negative people is a great way to improve your life.
You'd like to think entitled people with nothing to offer but complaints would learn. But when one of them finishes growing up, they seem to get replaced by someone new and even more entitled.
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Oh, that random internet guy is the worst. I should know, he's my next-door neighbour!
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Yep. And to achieve it; turn off push notifications.
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"Declining to engage with negative people is a great way to improve your life."
Ironically, he works for Microsoft...
Re: Good for him (Score:2)
On the flip-side. Sometimes people need to learn to distinguish criticism about oneâ(TM)s work from personal attacks. All too often lone project maintainers take big reports way too personally. This is an easy no-hire indicator for me.
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Ever consider that maybe you're just fucking annoying to some (many?) people, and because of your reactions people enjoy pushing your buttons further?
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Stop posting.
The Onion? (Score:3)
There will always be bullies (Score:2)
The internet gave everyone a voice. It also gave you the power to easily block them.
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People shouldn't be bullying other people who are giving them stuff for free.
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Maybe if he didn't write such terrible code he would get more positive comments?
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It is written in Rust by a Microsoft programmer.
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Not sure if that's supposed to be a double positive or a double negative.
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People shouldn't be bullying other people who are giving them stuff for free.
Or course they shouldn't. I should be able to walk around big cities with wads of cash hanging out of my pockets. You can have laws and rules, but it is impossible to stop bad human behavior 100% of the time. The best course of action is to know reality and adapt to it.
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There is a lot of stuff people should not be doing but are doing all the time. You have to find a way to deal with it, expecting people to change just because what they are doing is stupid, wrong, impolite, self-destructive, etc. is futile.
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You didn't buy that reasoning for racism, so why are you buying it for bullying?
Re: There will always be bullies (Score:2)
Analogy fail.
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Knowledge fail [thecrimson.com].
Re: There will always be bullies (Score:2)
Relevance fail.
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Rebuttal fail.
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Function FAIL () has caused a bluescreen. Abort, retry?
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But I asked my question first. Don't be rude. Give an answer, get an answer.
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Hardly random [jta.org].
Re: no surprise, most people are selfish jerks (Score:2)
If you think everyone is a jerk, you're probably selfish.
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You mean he sounds like a normal human. Who the hell wants to work on something (for free) that makes them feel bad? The guy has to work for Microsoft during the day you know.
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Lol, no, it is literally a description of narcissism.
A person shouldn't want to feel bad. But with those expectations, they will.
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Sure hope you don't say anything like that around Democrats.
Re: All about feelings (Score:2)
If youâ(TM)re expecting something in return, then itâ(TM)s not free.
But if youâ(TM)re setting the price, donâ(TM)t be surprised if you donâ(TM)t get paid.
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No. No. It literally isn't. Here's what the Mayo clinic says [mayoclinic.org]:
Narcissistic personality disorder â" one of several types of personality disorders â" is a mental condition in which people have an inflated sense of their own importance, a deep need for excessive attention and admiration, troubled relationships, and a lack of empathy for others. But behind this mask of extreme confidence lies a fragile self-esteem that's vulnerable to the slightest criticism.
Note the requirements that the person have an inflated sense of importance, that they require excessive attention and admiration, and lack empathy for others.
Simply wanting to be praised for doing good things does not in any way fit the above definition. And is, 100%, normal.
That's exactly what was described above.
And no, there is nothing normal about wanting praise from strangers. You don't even fucking know them, you shouldn't care. And if not getting it is going to hurt your feelings, that proves it is excessive. That's literally the definition of excessive neediness; it causes you emotional harm.
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No. That's a new age Urban Dictionary definition. Everyone has an ego, self-interest and a desire to feel good about themselves and their work. Narcissism is a specific case, when these desire and self-interest become so overwhelmingly dominating in behaviour that it turns pathological. Don't throw around terms randomly.
There is nothing pathological about a ragequit. This guy feels like he isn't apprieciated for doing something, so he stopped doing it. Just because he was vocal about why he did so on the Gi
Re: All about feelings (Score:2)
Sounds like borderline personality disorder to me. Do a thing, expect to get rewarded, blame others if they donâ(TM)t appreciate it.
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He didn't blame others for not being rewarded (RTFAWL). He blamed some members of his community of negative commentary that he found demotivating, and specifically mentions personal attacks because of differing views on how the software should be developed.
If the environment in this community was really that uncivil/hostile, it is natural that he doesn't want any part of it. You don't know what commentary actually occurred and whether his quitting is "reasonable". In fact, it doesn't even matter if he is ov
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Not all of us feel bad when working on a project like that. We're adults, we know that happy customers hardly ever say anything while the unhappy ones are loud. We let it slide off and feel good about maintaining a project that people value. We feel good about the status we get from being a solid community member. We feel good because we don't let the jerks get us down.
Honestly, it's rather childish to let one's emotions rule oneself in such a way. You raise a good point, though: what's more normal amo
Re: All about feelings (Score:2)
Itâ(TM)s not âoechildishâ, itâ(TM)s a diagnosed mental illness: borderline personality disorder.
Re: All about feelings (Score:2)
Or maybe just past tolerating dickishness. (Score:2)
I've released a few things myself, most recently my sampled electric guitar VST [bandcamp.com]. The first version (from 2018) wasn't great for general use, even though it did what I needed, and I came to realize (as I wrote more music) that the capabilities needed to expand. If people had said so, I would have been fine with that and even added the capabilities they asked for (provided I reasonably could). But no, all the comments were about "it sounds like a Casio keyboard" (guess what, electric guitars don't sound very
The beauty of Open Source (Score:2)
It looks like it was released under the Apache 2.0 license, and I don't think there is anything that lets him revoke the license after he made it public.
If he throws a hissy fit and deletes his copy of the code, I don't believe that he can stop anybody from just taking their latest copy and continuing the project from there.
Life goes on. No matter how special some people think they are.
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That's the only reason he changed his mind about that part of his hissy fit; he can't actually affect any damage. Funny as hell, IMO.
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The wonderful thing about opensource licenses is that anybody can take code and fork it.
"Can" yes, but "will" no, not even close.
If it as popular and useful as he seems to think, then somebody will.
If it does not happen, then it means that this is just another crappy web framework that nobody who matters cares about.
If he throws a hissy fit and deletes his copy of the code, I don't believe that he can stop anybody from just taking their latest copy and continuing the project from there.
I have no idea why you would even think that might be the case, or has any relevance to the problem at hand. Of course others can fork it, and of course that won't address the problem.
I have no idea what you are talking about.
There is no problem.
Life goes on. No matter how special some people think they are.
Exactly, all those snowflakes using someone elses work, threatening physical harm to the developer for not bending to their every whim, will continue unabated, and both life and its problems will go on.
I actually read the articles, and did not see anything about "threatening physical harm to the developer".
My post was about the one special little snowflake that thinks he can affect opensource by making his copy of the code private.
A few people might
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The code is free. And the people don't matter.
Some of you people couldn't do more damage to the open source world if you tried.
Stopped reading at "Rust". (Score:2)
It explained everything.
Thougj I should have already realized it ar "framework".
(The difference between a library and a framework, is that a library is sharing and integrating into your project, while a framework expects you to integrate into *it*, and lock you in to have no other gods beside it. The latter mindset is fundamentally incompatible to open source, let alone FLOSS. Like open source versus closed source.)
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And yes, "frameworks" are a plague, most of them are written by people who think their ideas are so fancy that it is beyond them to just write a piece of software that does a specific thing, so they "leave it to the audience" to pro
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Indeed.
I've had it! (Score:4, Funny)
Can't take this acrimonious atmosphere anymore. I'm quitting and going over to work on the systemd team.
It is My Sincere Opinion (Score:2)
That the Internet conclusively answered the question “Are people born good, and they learn to be bad, or are they born bad and learn to be good?”
What we’ve done, is taken human nature, and amplified it ... allowing the effects to spread beyond one’s immediate environment.
While the idea of the collaborative digital village was potentially a good one, we forgot to take into account human nature, which dictates that people spend most of their time thinking about themselves, and a neglig
It's the maintainer's fault (Score:3)
There's no reason you have to read people's comments or accept pull requests. He did this to himself.
I totally agree (Score:2)
Years ago I developed a project called driver on demand for Linux which was simply an easy way to install drivers (this pre-dated ubuntu's driver project).
The amount of BS you put up with is incredible..
I had people telling me that they didn't want linux to be like windows and it wasn't needed because all the drivers were included, etc. If people are wondering what's holding linux back, sometimes I feel its the "elite" users from the non-development community..
Shit comments is death (Score:2)
I've seen many web forums and Usenet groups fall because of assclowns trying to be l33t, picking on all the new comers, and just being a childish, immature high school clique.
Yes, if I was running a business, this would be enough for me to shun Open Source and bed down with M$. >:(
Re: Shit comments is death (Score:2)
Winter Sucks (Score:2, Offtopic)
Is he up in the Redmond area? Somebody go be a friend to this guy - he might be having a month where nothing seems OK. He might need help taking things one day at a time until the sun comes back.
Maintenance is a thankless task (Score:2)
Been there, done that. The problem with being a maintainer is that you are responsible for juggling interests while ensuring that things continue to work. People developing feature A do not care about whether they break feature B, nor do the feature B people care much about what's being proposed by feature A. One way to limit this is, of course, to be more selective about what kind of changes you will take and which not. The downsides of this is that if you become too much of a barrier, someone will ultimat
Unsafe?? Those are features! (Score:2)