There are two options: fork it, or use your people skills to try to persuade people with commit access that it should be the way you want. People skills being at a deficit in our field, many choose option C: hurl abuse at any available target.

True, but browsers are a pretty degenerate case because of just how painful they are to work on.

Firefox has made some questionable decisions, and as expected, we’ve seen a bunch of forks that reverted them. I’m writing this comment on a Firefox fork.

It’s also important to keep in mind sometimes people write passive aggressive things on the net to be brief, which can be interpreted as snakiness and offensive.

True, also some people do not speak English as their native language, so the terseness can be seen offensive. I know this since I’ve been in this position as someone who doesn’t speak English as native language.

I would assume that KDE is a bit unusual here, as it is extremely popular among users who themselves are not OSS contributors.

I was about to post almost the same thing. User-facing F/OSS projects seem to get a lot of hate, probably because there’s a large group of users who lack the skills to fix it. These days, I mostly work on F/OSS projects that are consumed by people familiar with the same tools that I’m using to write them, so I tend to get more patches than angry criticism.

The only way of really addressing this long term[1] is to make sure that end users can become contributors. I wish folks working on user-facing F/OSS things would invest more in end-user programming tools. Things like changing the visual appearance of something should be possible with little or no programming experience. If you focus on enabling this kind of thing, before you focus on making the appearance usable / pretty then you are likely to find that you have a big pool of people who both can and want to contribute.

I’ve written about this before over the years. It’s one of the big problems with the FSF’s messaging. They promote things as benefits to end users, but the only end users that can actually take advantage of most of their freedoms are ones that either are, or employ, programmers. And even then, a lot of Free Software is not particularly approachable. If they really wanted their agenda to resonate then they need to make end-user modification a priority for every FSF-backed product. When a proprietary product has an embedded scripting language along with GUI ‘no-code’ tools for common tasks and a F/OSS equivalent has C source code that you can modify, the typical end user is able to take advantage of the four freedoms to a far greater extent with the proprietary program. Addressing this mismatch was one of our goals with Étoilé.

[1] I’m discounting ‘fix the humans’ as a solution, because folks who try that generally end up committing genocide, which tends to be frowned upon in most F/OSS communities.

I wonder if part of it comes down to a feeling of choice and agency.

Like if you were happily using your OS and it gave you one version of KDE, (maybe you didn’t pick KDE, but it was the default, and it worked with you years ago, so you went with it) and then some day you found a different version that doesn’t work the way you like, it’s easy to see how this would make someone upset. You were relying on your OS to work one way, and without your consent it changed out from under you.

Meanwhile if you went out of your way to go and install some random FOSS tool yourself, built it from scratch, and started using it, you are a lot more aware of the development process. You chose to start using it, and it’s a lot easier to just stop if you don’t like it any more.

Very often a good way to diffuse the conversation is to show exit. “forks are explicitly encouraged” is something I say (and mean) often. There’s also an option of not using software in question.

That’s a great option, as long as you’re secure in the strength of the mainline project’s support.

I’m a little skeptical about how that translates to user-facing projects like KDE. There’s a pretty narrow niche of people with the skills to contribute to a project like KDE (I mean even building and hacking on it is the kind of stuff that second-year students would need some guidance with) and they are not exactly the kind of people who would dismiss something because it doesn’t look like someone rubber stamped it in Cupertino.

I definitely agree it’s a factor though. The FOSS community has a history of market share envy, so anything that looks like it might drive people away is seen like a huge problem, even though sometimes it’s really a feature.

1. Everyone expects FOSS to be a viable alternative to proprietary software - this is literally the FSF’s goal, in fact.

Yes, but the way this is usually pictured – both because users are entitled and because lots of folks at the FOSS end of things want to project that image – is that FOSS projects give you exactly what proprietary software gives you, and doesn’t demand the eye-watering fees, either.

But other than blog posts by embittered developers, which are largely hidden from the public eye (for statistically significant definitions of “public”), the FOSS world is conspicuously silent about how that free lunch is paid for.

Proprietary software sites go all revolutionary this, best-in-its-class that, here’s how much it costs, also here’s a tiny fine print. Corporate-ish-branded free software, like KDE and Gnome, also goes revolutionary this, best-in-its-class that, for everyone, by everyone, but then the tiny fine print that says “testing is best-effort”, “unless you maintain it yourself your favourite feature may be deprecated long before the current Windows version is EOL-ed”, “customer support response times are technically infinite because there’s no customer suppport” is dusted under the rug.

These are very much things that have to be said. You can’t not tell people about them, loudly, in the same big bold letters you use to say “Get things done with ease, comfort, and control”, and then wonder why they don’t know them.

Don’t get me wrong, like my message above said, I think people have no right to be assholes to FOSS developers, but that’s just common sense. But this is also a corner in which the FOSS community is painting itself.

I would not say this is the problem. FOSS’s greatest contribution to the world, beyond the actual utility of the programs, is just that: profits are not necessary to motivate humans to create amazing and useful things. It does work. They can’t tell us it’s impossible. This flies in the face of the fundamental ideas behind capitalism, which is that it is necessary for workers to be alternately cajoled, abused, and dictated to by capitalists to make anything, with the capitalists taking a massive cut of what’s produced in return for their cajole/abuse/dictate services. The odd blog post by some FOSS maintainer cracking under pressure happens because the rest of society still operates under this barbaric form of labor organization - specifically the abuse aspect, because not working at a capitalist firm is punished by the threat of homelessness with its attendant horrors.