Well, yeah, which would make perfect sense if a) Firefox was made by volunteers instead of whatever weird blend of non-profit and for-profit companies are running Mozilla these days, and b) if I was filing a bug report instead of casually mentioning that Firefox can be buggy sometimes in social media.
If I was filing a bug report I’d be attaching… you know, logs. And repro steps. As you do in a bug report. I don’t even know if Firefox has a bug submission process for the public. I assume they don’t. Most of those are worthless anyway.
Look, besides the notion that the whole discussion is rather pointless, the idea I was trying to impress earlier is that the end user doesn’t care or need to care about the challenges of OSS development. Being free and open source may be a practical selling point, a moral selling point or not a selling point at all, but ultimately when you use a thing you just kinda need it to work first. When you complain, or even just mention, an issue with some piece of OSS in places like this you just tend to get a bunch of IT and workarounds back.
Which is fine, I get it, it’s people trying to be nice, but… you know, it doesn’t make a great case for the ecosystem. Me saying “eeeh, FF can be a bit flaky sometimes you may want to reboot it every now and then” is an anecdote. Me saying that and going down a rabbit hole of profiling and memory snapshots in the futile attempt to fix some arcane interaction between Youtube and a bunch of add-on software Youtube doesn’t want me to run is rightfully enough to put off the average person. All I’m saying is not every person mentioning a thing they noticed in a piece of OSS needs a howto doc and a list of highly technical homework as a response.
Well, yeah, which would make perfect sense if a) Firefox was made by volunteers instead of whatever weird blend of non-profit and for-profit companies are running Mozilla these days, and b) if I was filing a bug report instead of casually mentioning that Firefox can be buggy sometimes in social media.
If I was filing a bug report I’d be attaching… you know, logs. And repro steps. As you do in a bug report. I don’t even know if Firefox has a bug submission process for the public. I assume they don’t. Most of those are worthless anyway.
Look, besides the notion that the whole discussion is rather pointless, the idea I was trying to impress earlier is that the end user doesn’t care or need to care about the challenges of OSS development. Being free and open source may be a practical selling point, a moral selling point or not a selling point at all, but ultimately when you use a thing you just kinda need it to work first. When you complain, or even just mention, an issue with some piece of OSS in places like this you just tend to get a bunch of IT and workarounds back.
Which is fine, I get it, it’s people trying to be nice, but… you know, it doesn’t make a great case for the ecosystem. Me saying “eeeh, FF can be a bit flaky sometimes you may want to reboot it every now and then” is an anecdote. Me saying that and going down a rabbit hole of profiling and memory snapshots in the futile attempt to fix some arcane interaction between Youtube and a bunch of add-on software Youtube doesn’t want me to run is rightfully enough to put off the average person. All I’m saying is not every person mentioning a thing they noticed in a piece of OSS needs a howto doc and a list of highly technical homework as a response.