> support people are not your janitors. Quit expecting us to spend hours digging through arcane documentation, followed by further hours troubleshooting things that you left half-finished
I am amazed once again at some people's ability to take free stuff and complain that it isn't making them money fast enough.
Just take a few seconds to think about the value we all get out of the deep and broad Free Software stacks. Finding bugs and fixing docs is a part of that process. You're not entitled to any of it, but you're welcome to participate and partake of the fruits.
The problem is that writing the code yourself is nice, while tracing/solving bugs in the code of others and fixing docs sucks. Too many free software authors do the nice work and rely on others to do the dirty work. They write code, release it and claim victory, while their code is only barely usable. The problem is that something barely usable is better than something nonexistent, so it gets used and we are stuck with a suboptimal solution. In this respect, free software development constantly gets stuck in a local maximum.
You have to weigh the value of immediacy against permanently enshrined qualities and perform your own cost-benefit analysis.
This is called critical thinking, they introduce this around age 12 in most western societies. You don't have to pick a religion and stick with it, you can just make a judgment call on a case-by-case basis.
> Quit expecting us to spend hours digging through arcane documentation, followed by further hours troubleshooting things that you left half-finished
I am amazed once again at some people's ability to take free stuff and complain that it isn't making them money fast enough.
That complaint applies equally to commercial software.
CEO arrives in a foreign airport, calls us up because his Blackberry now shows email headers instead of email, including email in his inbox which previously had all the content. The carrier tells me everything is setup fine for roaming and he needs to reset his Blackberry by taking the battery and SIM out, and then booting it with no SIM, then putting it back together properly. And if that doesn't work, he needs a new phone. And we couldn't talk him through it because that's his phone, and we couldn't email instructions, and anyway it was evening in an airport and he was in no mood for it.
This is a commercial device, praised for its business email handling, dealing with a well established, decades old protocol, from a large international carrier. Talk about a problem which just shouldn't happen, with a nonsensical solution.
And it's just one anecdotal example of every day workaround-finding. Wobbly software Jenga towers everywhere, and reboot-into-a-known-state is rule number 1.
I am amazed once again at some people's ability to take free stuff and complain that it isn't making them money fast enough.
Just take a few seconds to think about the value we all get out of the deep and broad Free Software stacks. Finding bugs and fixing docs is a part of that process. You're not entitled to any of it, but you're welcome to participate and partake of the fruits.