my name is mwd

One of the joys of doing open source work is that you get the satisfaction of knowing you’ve made something that people find useful and work. Sometimes they’re nice enough to give you feedback, or even make a PayPal donation (one so far, but it was a very nice surprise!).

Bug reports are the most common form of feedback, particularly with osx2x. In case you don’t know, osx2x is just a tool I wrote as I had the need for such a think, and then I made it available to others because I figured others might have a similar need and what’s the point of them reinvenint the wheel. I decided to give it away for free (and indeed opened the source) because at the time I decided I didn’t want to have to commit to supporting it. That said, I’m always pleased when someone gets in touch, and I’ll try and fix any problems someone is having. Occasionally I turn requests down, but that’s only because the engineering effort is too much for me to commit to or I don’t have the resources to hand to do what they want. But generally, I’m happy to help.

However, what really narks me off is when I get mail like I did today. It was a very blunt and condecending email, both reporting what isn’t actually a bug and then complaining that my bug reporting system is inadequate. Well, I’m sooooooo sorry that it’s not up to your usual high standards of bug reporting. Here was me thinking I was possibly doing people a favour by giving away something for free that I happened to find useful. Apparently just having my e-mail address as the contact point isn’t sufficient. The reason there’s no official bug report system is that it’s not an officially supported product! It’s free! What do you want?!?! I know a lot of open source projects have such things (like the wonderful dudes at opendarwin.org, who have a nice bugzilla bug reporting system) - but that’s a privilage rather than something they have to do. I do support osx2x to some degree, but that’s purely out of the kindness of my heart, not because dweebs like this demand it.

To reiterate - I’m happy to help with osx2x, I’d like to make people happy. But if they’re partonizing about it they can go take a long walk off a short peir. Cheers for ruining my morning dude.

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