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The tortured protagonist is a core online archetype.
Read the article. He talks about things to do in his private time.

I don't know about you, but working after a full day of work is not really pleasing in the long run.

You hear this often because it's a common problem in Open Source.

I did read it. It fit the archetype.

A high agency individual looks for and finds solutions. Sidekiq is a great example. So is WordPress. Even Github was. Watch Tom Preston-Werner's Mixergy interview and you'll see that he specifically put thought into making sure it would generate revenue in a sustainable fashion if it were to become popular.

Is your argument that it's the author's fault that the bugs aren't being fixed because he volunteers on open source software when he instead should have found a way to get paid to work on it?
All three examples I shared were open source.

To answer your question a bit more directly, yes. He doesn't like the consequences of running a reasonably large, unmonetized project. It isn't precisely a fault, but it is a situation he's not happy with and one that flows from his own decisions.

He's not a passive victim of the internet. He's an intelligent actor with the power to take different actions and get different results. He's also free to continue down the current path, but he doesn't appear to enjoy it.

Thanks for your response!

> All three examples I shared were open source.

Indeed; I was making a distinction between volunteer and paid.

> To answer your question a bit more directly, yes. He doesn't like the consequences of running a reasonably large, unmonetized project. It isn't precisely a fault, but it is a situation he's not happy with and one that flows from his own decisions.

I didn't read it as him being at all unhappy with the consequences. He is merely communicating the consequences of it to other people on the internet who are unhappy with it.

> He's not a passive victim of the internet. He's an intelligent actor with the power to take different actions and get different results. He's also free to continue down the current path, but he doesn't appear to enjoy it.

And this is where we read the article differently. To me, he seems perfectly happy with the state of affairs, with a 9-5 job that pays the bills and several hours on a volunteer project that he gets some other satisfaction out of.

I guess I tend to give other people the benefit of the doubt when it comes to agency. I interpret "I don't have time for X" to mean "I have other things I am doing that are more important to me than X" which assumes the person is assuming responsibility for their choices.

Which is a big problem IMO. Many employers are willing to lean on open source tech to reduce cost. Much, much fewer are willing to let employees spend time contributing to open source as a way of paying back the open source community. Thats incredibly short sighted, as it reduces the resources contributing to the technology the company now relies on.
FYI Magnus Manske wrote the first version of MediaWiki, the PHP software which is underlying Wikipedia. It is constantly evolving and nowadays still a state-of-the-art code with a mature code base, a great documentation, API, extendability. Ontop of MediaWiki, people built WikiData or the semantic MediaWiki extension which can be used in a way to write complex web applications right ontop of a wiki with a minimum of code (wrote a video portal once based on SMW).

Having that said, the wikipedia ecosystem lives from a number of seperate tools which query the wikipedia database. One of the early well-known tools was the editcounter which allowed people to count their edits on wikipedia, for instance.

I think it is fair enough to let these tools be tools. Either they work for you or they don't. Many of them are open sourced and you can go on, fork and host them on your own.

Instead, this tells nothing about the quality of MediaWiki, IMHO. There are a number of maintainers keeping up quality and progress in MediaWiki itself.

Their API and documentation is pretty great. It allowed me to whip up a script to access WikiPedia in my shell in no time.

(https://github.com/jorvi/shiki, in case anyone wants it)

What a strange way to categorize whose bug it is.
Are you referring to "Why I didn't fix your bug"? Because that struck me too. I agree with the thrust of the article, but it's a shame the title implies a slightly misguided attitude. I say "implies", because it's probably a 'mistype', but it's certainly one worth addressing for future readers, IMO.
I think it's just poorly phrased. He's referring to the proverbial "you" and the bug "you" reported, not the bug "you" introduced.
That seems like a deliberate misinterpretation on your part. There's clearly an implied "report" that comes after "bug".
His time calculation is more than friendly to the community! Dedicate 6 hours to non work coding is insane.

Take care of you!

> -2h private (eat, exercise, shower, read, girlfriend, etc.)

How to manage to do all of this in 2h? Just for Gym it's always around 40-50m, not counting the time to get there and back. Eat unless you always order out it takes also 40-50 (prep and eat).

The author immediately qualifies those numbers, which addresses your question.

> Now, 6h left is a high estimate, obviously; work and private can (and do) expand on a daily, fluctuating basis, as they do for all of us.

Many people can (prep and) eat in much less time than 40-50 minutes.
I'm a slow eater. It would take me 40 minutes just to finish the meal, without counting prep and cook.

I frequently wish I didn't have to eat at all - it would more than double my productivity and free time.

That wish was the itch that Soylent was built to scratch. I've gone back and forth on it, but in the end I found that mixing the powder up wasn't that much easier than just making a sandwich. The bottled version is a really quick way to get some sustenance but it generates a lot of waste...
Very good article. I always reiterate that I and everyone else involved in my open source communities are volunteers. Everyone has their own agenda and unless they explicitly ask me for direction, they work on what they want. Maybe you can convince them to take on your bug, but if it doesn't affect them then it's probably not going to get looked at expediently, if at all. Send a patch!