He's not an open source developer. He's someone who writes code for himself, then makes it available to people in case they might find it useful. I think that's different.
> ... is complaining about his open source customer ...
"Customer" is an interesting word. If someone leaves stuff around with a sign saying "help yourself" and I take some, am I a "customer"? No, I don't think so.
> ... complaining about his code.
I don't think it's the "complaint", /per se/, I think it's the tone of the complaint. I've had this. People have picked up stuff I've chosen to make available, then they've demanded I enhance it in the ways they want. Further, their demands border on the threatening.
I just wish more people would make their work available, fewer people would make demands, and that people in general were more constructive and just tried to get along.
Unusually extreme climactic conditions in Hades seem more likely, though.
He's someone who writes code for homself, then makes it available to people in case they might find it useful.
That actually sounds like an excellent definition for a big fraction of source developers. One of the many benefits of open source is that it captures and aggregates value of even very modest contributions as well as the value of major contributions.
I'm curious what would make someone an open-source developer if ~"writing code and making it freely available to people"~ is not the chief qualification.
As far as I can tell, its not the "Open-source" portion that is debated, its the developer portion. I have written a bit of code which I share around (and I think I'll actually start using the WTFPL license on it), but I would never consider myself an open-source developer. For the most part, its all code I threw together in an afternoon or a weekend (or, in one case a week of afternoons), and I thought "someone else may want this, so I'll make it available to them".
To make this clear, I am not a software developer. I'm a college student/tech support person who just happens to write some semi-useful code. Its not software, there's little-to-no documentation, and I'll only be supporting it if I think the problem is interesting.
In my mind there is a continuum between two points.
1: Those who write code specifically for the purpose of making it available, possibly originally because they wanted it themselves, but now because it's been made open, people are using it, and they're deriving some sort of (possibly intangible) benefits from it (karma, esteem, recognition, PostCardWare, whatever)
and
2: People who write code, often small scripts or functions, purely because they need them, and, almost as an afterthought, make them publically readable with no thought to getting anything in return, but simply because they think the world would be a better place if more people did that.
In linguistic terms, the concept of "Open Source Developer" has, in my mind "baggage". Your semantics may differ from mine, but to me, there is a distinction to be made.
To me an "Open Source Developer" is someone who is paid by an interested big-corp to work full time on a project that's open source: there's lots of them at Red Hat, Novell, Canonical, IBM (ASF crap especially), Intel, Sun, Apple, etc.
It's distinct from "scratch your own itch" stuff, especially when it's a project or a feature you wouldn't otherwise work on.
I guess one problem is that expecations of users of OSS are not just a thing between the developer of a particular piece of software and its users. The open source movement has been busy creating expectations of OSS being better supported, higher quality software with a commercial business model.
All the big corporations supporting open source by making code available also change the perception that open source is some kind of grass roots non-commercial thing. The single developer of some open source library may in fact be on the payroll of some BigCorp playing some kind of advocacy role for which he is being paid a salary.
You don't know unless you dig deeper and some people don't dig deeper. They just work on the basis of general assumptions formed by the collective advocacy effort of the open source movement as a whole.
Of course that doesn't mean an individual developer has to honor that collective promise. I do understand that guy's rant. I'm just trying to explain how such misguided expectations can arise.
The conclusion, for me, is this: Don't use open source software unless you don't need it and could build it yourself, unless you know why the developer has a vested interest in making you, the user, happy.
