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When the last discussion of X being abandon-ware came up one of the things I wanted to say, being the creator of a highly used open source project myself, is th

When the last discussion of X being abandon-ware came up one of the things I wanted to say, being the creator of a highly used open source project myself, is that people are ultimately responsible for software. I was going to speculate that the maintainer of X might be burnt out and that none of us have any right to his free labour, and that the people whining should probably step up or shut up. Open source software is also free (as in beer) software. There's a word for people who complain about free things.

yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
> There's a word for people who complain about free things. The post and comments are free, yet here you are complaining. Consider why you think that's okay, and you'll understand.
- johncolanduoni 6y ago
  A post and comment today is by necessity an active effort; judging the quality of an ongoing effort on a project and judging why there isn’t an ongoing effort on the project are two very different things.
  - pessimizer 6y ago
    What if you write a comment about it?
stonogo 6y ago
Most (almost all) of the X.org and Wayland developers are paid for their work.
- emersion 6y ago
  Not really. There are hundreds of contributors not paid by anyone. Until 1 year ago I wasn't paid for my Wayland-related work. I'm now very lucky to have a company sponsor my contributions, but that's far from being the case of everybody. Even if all developers were paid, they wouldn't be paid _by users_. It means the developers don't owe the users anything.
  - anonunivgrad 6y ago
    “You’re not owed anything,” from the developers of a flailing project to its users, is a red flag. Those users are the target market that those companies are interested in pleasing. It’s not about “owing” or not. It’s about delivering something that people want to use or not. If you fail, the users will go elsewhere. You don’t have to care; you might develop the software for your own personal gratification. But people are going to share their dissatisfaction and might very well vote with their feet. And it’s possible that, even if they don’t, your work makes the world a worse place. No, no one can sue you or call you a cheat for doing a bad job, but they don’t have to like it either.
    - emersion 6y ago
      > Those users are the target market that those companies are interested in pleasing. Not really, no. My company (SourceHut) has nothing to do with Wayland and is just sponsoring me for working on open-source software (_any_ open-source software). A few other developers are working for Collabora, which mainly focuses on Wayland for embedded use-cases. So, none of these companies have a real interest in pleasing desktop users. Regardless, it doesn't mean that I personally don't care about my users, or that I want to fight against them. It's just that if you don't like something, you need to step up and do something about it to improve the situation, instead of just complaining. Maintainers are scarce. > it’s possible that […] your work makes the world a worse place Always great to hear that…
      - dreamer_ 6y ago
        From a fellow maintainer of open source software (currently not being paid for the work at all) - I agree 100%. Users are always demanding things: new features (which sometimes are very bad ideas), merging patches (which sometimes were never tested), expecting answers for questions that were asked and answered thousands of times before… > It's just that if you don't like something, you need to step up and do something about it to improve the situation, instead of just complaining. Exactly. Users who want to say on X (for whatever reason) should start contributing instead of spending time blaming the devs. If they want to switch to Wayland, but are missing something - they should work towards fixing it instead of dragging everyone else back.
znpy 6y ago
You miss the point. The problem is not wayland. I root for wayland and I hope it'll progress steadily to maturity. The problem is getting pushed to drop my well-working Xorg-based setup for some wayland-based setup that can't run the application I use daily and that I've been running for years. I'm okay with wayland, but I have a problem with people telling me "oh just drop that".
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- osobo 6y ago
  I'm fairly sure you missed his point. Entirely.
  - Reelin 6y ago
    No, GGP is saying that we (users) have no right to complain about a FOSS developer abandoning their project since we don't compensate them for it. GP is saying yeah, that's great and all, but other people try to push everyone to switch to Wayland because <reasons>. The Wayland ecosystem simply isn't there yet though; they're hawking a broken solution. It's perfectly fine for a FOSS developer to walk away from any given project. When third parties come along and frame things as though the only option is to switch to a broken "solution" it derails the discussion. We (ie the community at large) should be having much broader discussions about both how to keep maintenance going as well as what's needed to actually make the replacement viable (so we can maybe switch to it later).
    - sergeykish 6y ago
      It is not Waylands fault that it serves same niche as X.Org. People who had objections against systemd maintained init systems [1], created new distributions [2]. I do not pretend there are no problems with systemd but it serves my (quite common) needs. And the way distributions shows some people were burnt out. If you need X.Org (and I do), speak how to help X.Org. Some people needs covered by Wayland. It is not their fault. Distributions default may be questionable, it is distributions problem not Waylands. I use Arch Linux, no default, no problems. [1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Init https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Init [2] https://devuan.org/ https://devuan.org/
bigbubba 6y ago
Trying to shaming critics into silence might suppress their criticism, but it won't make them like you.
- hacknat 6y ago
  I'm not trying to shame anyone into silence. I'm not trying to shame anyone. However, I would like to see people complain less and act more. Being on the other side of open source software is eye-opening. It can be very disheartening to get mostly negative feedback for something done out of passion (even if you might make a bit of money for it).
  - bigbubba 6y ago
    It's good to hear you aren't trying to shame anybody. Incidentally, what is the word for people who complain about free things?
    - hacknat 6y ago
      Well there, I was being a bit prickly... It's not a nice word, I'll leave it to everyone's imagination.
romanoderoma 6y ago
> There's a word for people who complain about free things. You don't complain about the weather?
- hacknat 6y ago
  I don't think I do (I'm generally not easily put out by weather), but I would argue that the weather isn't free. I have to survive and deal with weather (clothes, shelter, etc) no matter where I live or what I do.
  - nextaccountic 6y ago
    Well, it's free as in free beer. I'm not paying for the weather, but I still complain about it.
- sergeykish 6y ago
  Do you complain about people building new shelter (for free)? The one (also free) we are using is impossible to fix though some people still maintain it.
nullc 6y ago
I don't see anyone complaining that X isn't being maintained. Only that they'd rather use (unmaintained) X over Wayland due to numerous shortcomings in wayland that are practically unfixable (because they're intentional design choices, or because they're a result of the fragmentation resulting from wayland's design choices).
- bee_rider 6y ago
  What new features have even been added to X lately? It is fine. It is done. Maybe something better will come along at some point, but we could just keep using it like this indefinitely.

yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago

> There's a word for people who complain about free things. The post and comments are free, yet here you are complaining. Consider why you think that's okay, and you'll understand.

johncolanduoni 6y ago
A post and comment today is by necessity an active effort; judging the quality of an ongoing effort on a project and judging why there isn’t an ongoing effort on the project are two very different things.
- pessimizer 6y ago
  What if you write a comment about it?

stonogo 6y ago

Most (almost all) of the X.org and Wayland developers are paid for their work.

emersion 6y ago
Not really. There are hundreds of contributors not paid by anyone. Until 1 year ago I wasn't paid for my Wayland-related work. I'm now very lucky to have a company sponsor my contributions, but that's far from being the case of everybody. Even if all developers were paid, they wouldn't be paid _by users_. It means the developers don't owe the users anything.
- anonunivgrad 6y ago
  “You’re not owed anything,” from the developers of a flailing project to its users, is a red flag. Those users are the target market that those companies are interested in pleasing. It’s not about “owing” or not. It’s about delivering something that people want to use or not. If you fail, the users will go elsewhere. You don’t have to care; you might develop the software for your own personal gratification. But people are going to share their dissatisfaction and might very well vote with their feet. And it’s possible that, even if they don’t, your work makes the world a worse place. No, no one can sue you or call you a cheat for doing a bad job, but they don’t have to like it either.
  - emersion 6y ago
    > Those users are the target market that those companies are interested in pleasing. Not really, no. My company (SourceHut) has nothing to do with Wayland and is just sponsoring me for working on open-source software (_any_ open-source software). A few other developers are working for Collabora, which mainly focuses on Wayland for embedded use-cases. So, none of these companies have a real interest in pleasing desktop users. Regardless, it doesn't mean that I personally don't care about my users, or that I want to fight against them. It's just that if you don't like something, you need to step up and do something about it to improve the situation, instead of just complaining. Maintainers are scarce. > it’s possible that […] your work makes the world a worse place Always great to hear that…
    - dreamer_ 6y ago
      From a fellow maintainer of open source software (currently not being paid for the work at all) - I agree 100%. Users are always demanding things: new features (which sometimes are very bad ideas), merging patches (which sometimes were never tested), expecting answers for questions that were asked and answered thousands of times before… > It's just that if you don't like something, you need to step up and do something about it to improve the situation, instead of just complaining. Exactly. Users who want to say on X (for whatever reason) should start contributing instead of spending time blaming the devs. If they want to switch to Wayland, but are missing something - they should work towards fixing it instead of dragging everyone else back.

znpy 6y ago

You miss the point. The problem is not wayland. I root for wayland and I hope it'll progress steadily to maturity. The problem is getting pushed to drop my well-working Xorg-based setup for some wayland-based setup that can't run the application I use daily and that I've been running for years. I'm okay with wayland, but I have a problem with people telling me "oh just drop that".

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
osobo 6y ago
I'm fairly sure you missed his point. Entirely.
- Reelin 6y ago
  No, GGP is saying that we (users) have no right to complain about a FOSS developer abandoning their project since we don't compensate them for it. GP is saying yeah, that's great and all, but other people try to push everyone to switch to Wayland because <reasons>. The Wayland ecosystem simply isn't there yet though; they're hawking a broken solution. It's perfectly fine for a FOSS developer to walk away from any given project. When third parties come along and frame things as though the only option is to switch to a broken "solution" it derails the discussion. We (ie the community at large) should be having much broader discussions about both how to keep maintenance going as well as what's needed to actually make the replacement viable (so we can maybe switch to it later).
  - sergeykish 6y ago
    It is not Waylands fault that it serves same niche as X.Org. People who had objections against systemd maintained init systems [1], created new distributions [2]. I do not pretend there are no problems with systemd but it serves my (quite common) needs. And the way distributions shows some people were burnt out. If you need X.Org (and I do), speak how to help X.Org. Some people needs covered by Wayland. It is not their fault. Distributions default may be questionable, it is distributions problem not Waylands. I use Arch Linux, no default, no problems. [1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Init https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Init [2] https://devuan.org/ https://devuan.org/

bigbubba 6y ago

Trying to shaming critics into silence might suppress their criticism, but it won't make them like you.

hacknat 6y ago
I'm not trying to shame anyone into silence. I'm not trying to shame anyone. However, I would like to see people complain less and act more. Being on the other side of open source software is eye-opening. It can be very disheartening to get mostly negative feedback for something done out of passion (even if you might make a bit of money for it).
- bigbubba 6y ago
  It's good to hear you aren't trying to shame anybody. Incidentally, what is the word for people who complain about free things?
  - hacknat 6y ago
    Well there, I was being a bit prickly... It's not a nice word, I'll leave it to everyone's imagination.

romanoderoma 6y ago

> There's a word for people who complain about free things. You don't complain about the weather?

hacknat 6y ago
I don't think I do (I'm generally not easily put out by weather), but I would argue that the weather isn't free. I have to survive and deal with weather (clothes, shelter, etc) no matter where I live or what I do.
- nextaccountic 6y ago
  Well, it's free as in free beer. I'm not paying for the weather, but I still complain about it.
sergeykish 6y ago
Do you complain about people building new shelter (for free)? The one (also free) we are using is impossible to fix though some people still maintain it.

nullc 6y ago

I don't see anyone complaining that X isn't being maintained. Only that they'd rather use (unmaintained) X over Wayland due to numerous shortcomings in wayland that are practically unfixable (because they're intentional design choices, or because they're a result of the fragmentation resulting from wayland's design choices).

bee_rider 6y ago
What new features have even been added to X lately? It is fine. It is done. Maybe something better will come along at some point, but we could just keep using it like this indefinitely.