I honestly don't get why he gets angry. The project doesn't have a mailing list and the explanations on the readme are not that clear either. The user knew that issues are the wrong place to ask questions like that and asked for a better place.
Rob is making confusing comments himself: "Massive is pretty much "done" although a few things come in from time to time", but then "End of life. I think I said it's finished - meaning done". EOL and complete/stable are not the same thing.
Sure, some of the questions may be silly, but it's nothing huge to complain about. If you end up telling your users "Please - use something else and don't come back." you're the problem. The response could've been "I will not spend more time documenting this project or answering questions about it, there is no mailing list. Closing issue." and everyone could be so much more happy at the end.
The End of Life comment was quoting the person who opened the bug.
Rob said 'done', the commenter interpreted this as 'end of life', which is both clueless (in that way that corporate-worldview meets actual programmer can be) and borderline insulting.
"End of life. I think I said it's finished - meaning done". EOL and complete/stable are not the same thing.
Well, quite, as the entire conversation makes very clear. Rob doesn't say it was end of life, he said it was finished. He says "End of life." at the beginning of the para here to headline this part of his reply.
"If you end up telling your users "Please - use something else and don't come back." you're the problem."
He's not telling his users to get lost. His users are very happy and have used this project for ages and at massive scale because it's stable and it works. He's telling one particular user to get lost, a user that doesn't even understand how github works.
Communicating by text is hard. If you're not explicit, people could read something different than you intended - I read the last quote as saying project is EOL. The quoting is not obvious.
I stand by my opinion though. If you tell this to any single user, you're just being a mean person for no reason and you are the reason they are unlikely to understand what the issue is about. Maybe that user just read the message and wrote to people he knows "I'm never using opensource projects from github, and this maintainer is the reason." - how does that situation improve in the community?
Rob could end it in so many different ways that would be less aggressive. He didn't even say "learn how github/FOSS works and then check the project again", just "don't come back". It sounds like it's us-vs-them and "they" cannot be expected to learn and improve.
I've seen the entitlement Rob has seen, and to be frank, I see it a little bit in your messages to.
Rob doesn't owe this user anything. Nothing. Not even a reply.
He's being nice by responding at all. The passive-aggressive undertone to the user's questions - trying to evaluate the project to use it, and freeload on Rob's work, rather than take it as a starting point for further customization and personal stewardship, while criticizing things like performance before he's measured anything - this is pretty hard to swallow.
Rob may have responded to the cluelessness a little harshly, but it's hard to hold everything back when you're in a conversation with someone like this. And I don't blame him, because like I said, the guy wasn't owed anything.
Users like this aren't the "customers" for a piece of code like this. This is a seed file that you hack and customize for your purposes; it's not a library that you simply link in, or pull from upstream on a regular basis. The right thing to say to a user like this is: go away; this is not for you.
> If you end up telling your users "Please - use something
> else and don't come back." you're the problem.
Sometimes, removing toxic community members is a very positive thing to do for a community. When toxic members are tolerated, they have the effect of driving away the positive contributors.
The trolling asked for LINQ, !dynamics, and !single_file_database. Given that C#/.NET is moving away from LINQ as the goto abstraction over databases, it's hard to see a person requring those things ever using Massive in the first place.
Of course the idea that there is no mailing list for Massive where this sort of internet banter can occur...well that's exactly why there is no mailing list.
> Given that C#/.NET is moving away from LINQ as the goto abstraction over databases
What would you say they're moving towards? I have to shamefully admit that I never learned LINQ, preferring to write and use raw SQL(which can be unwieldy if you're dealing with the type of database that could really use an ORM), but I didn't know there was something else that trumps LINQ?
> If you end up telling your users "Please - use something else and don't come back." you're the problem.
haha seriously? He's the "problem"? What problem? He is the author and owner of the repo in question, and he can do pretty much whatever the hell he wants within that repo. The other guy is entitled to exactly on extra large serving of "nothing whatsoever".
If you have some freeloading, non contributing imbecile that randomly stops by to tell you how you did it all wrong, and when are you going to make it so that it is more to this guys liking, the only problem I see is the random twat.
Massive is not the right tool for the bugfiler's workflow.
or
The bugfiler's purpose is to engage in an Internet debate.
Neither is productive for anyone beyond entertainmemnt. Conrey covered both cases with reasonable aplomb, even if the long term reaction is a bit overboard.
"Here's a goal. We've reached it. Okay, we're done"
vs.
"Here's a goal. We've reached it, but look at all the other pretty bells and whistles we may have overlooked! We can't be done when there could be some cooler way of doing stuff or if we missed some architectural edge-case."
Yeah, sure, you could argue that this is a failure in communication from the original coder to the audience, but it speaks to a focus on something other than getting the job done. Once you head down the lane of "but what about X?", you no longer have a clear mission to accomplish.
I like Massive and have used it on several large projects, mostly moved to Dapper on stuff since. That said, this is borderline condescending. The guy was wrong about his assumptions and understanding of a moderately complex topic that 90% of .NET developers probably don't fully understand.
This complaint really has nothing to do with open source and is more about the frustration of interacting with other developers who believe they are right about something for which they are in part ignorant. That is going to happen pretty often.
I really hope this is just anger talking and not Rob being serious, he is wickedly good and I learn quite a bit from reading his code. Hoping to see more in the future.
Background: I was a .NET developer for quite a while myself. There are a lot of good things about the .NET world; I'm not saying any of this to trash that technology or that community.
> This complaint really has nothing to do with open source
Sure it does. It's about a group of people (.NET developers) who tend to be much newer to the open source world and therefore tend to be less familiar with the culture/etiquette expected from users of such projects.
So .NET developers stumble at times when they get involved with open source projects. Sometimes badly. (Sometimes they really shine, too.)
.NET or not, personally I don't see whats wrong with mwpowellhtx's question here. He made some wrong assumption, sure, but its not like he demanded stuff as if the project author owed him something. A bit of an overreaction, honestly.
But then again, that is just what I get from this short "discussion", and I don't know what are the stuffs that the author has put up with maintaining the project till now. I can easily imagine demanding emails from people taking open source projects for granted.
Bug reports are for bugs. That's the problem with the behavior. As Conrey mentions there are other ordinary channels for communicating with him...e.g. email and obviously Twitter.
Maybe I'm dumb, but with no mailing list or anything I would have likely gone to the same place. It's a page dedicated to the project where you can make comments. The goal is not "communication with Rob", the goal is "communication about Massive".
I could think of a million other reasons than someone asking questions in this case.
I agree with the entitlement sentiment however. I know no one else who uses .Net who has ever contributed anything other than whining and issue reports to an OSS project inside a typical MS consumer company. Never a patch committed back, never an improvement. Many companies I've worked for forbid such a thing and the only motivation to use the project in the first place is solely that it was free and no one had to go through a PO process.
This is however changing but there are still a lot of pre-OSS managerial types out there.
I suspect Rob's post was the final paper cut hence the explosion.
I mean, take me. Sift through my comment history here and you'll see that I'm not really much of an OSS guy. I'm selfish enough, or at least self-interested enough not to hand out my work for free. But even I have put in a handful of pull requests for .NET open source projects (and have released a few projects of my own).
There's a lot of room in the gap between me and "open source devotee". I wouldn't be surprised to find that there are a ton of guys there that happen to be good at stuff on the Microsoft stack.
You don't know me then. I've forked a v1.0 OSS .Net project on bitbucket and am attempting to get it moving forward again. I have a number of pull requests queued, waiting on the original two devs to communicate. So far, they've commented on one ticket, that's it.
Rob Conery comes off as a bully here. Regardless of context, they piled onto the guy (who seems to be using his real identity) on Twitter. They even made fun of the commenter's GitHub photo. Absolutely childish and pathetic.
On this I agree. The guy was out of line and used the wrong forum to criticize the project. Personal attacks on appearance or childish remarks were uncalled for.
The "done" bit is something I've noticed as well. People don't seem to grasp that software can be finished, so they equate "no commits this month" with "abandoned". I've seen the same complaint from people looking at a couple of my open source libraries.
Conery comes off poorly, even if the questioner seems like a drag. There are people like the questioner everywhere, with a poor read of the other side of the fence, bit of an entitled attitude, etc. Best to manage them minimally and very politely behind clenched teeth, and then move on.
Sorry to complain about this but the current title - "Rob Conery will never run a .NET Open Source project again. Here's why." - reminds me of those sites abusing emotional linkbait titles. The "Here's why." part is telling. Can we please avoid this here?
I have worked with many people like this. They want to appear smart vs getting code shipped. Many .NET projects fail because of developers like this guy. Many of the assumptions he is making are incorrect at worst and untested at best. I Have worked on a few EF projects and have never found that to perform better than SQL in any case other than the most simple example project scenarios. Dynamic binding will rarely be a performance concern when used properly.
This guy has read all the .NET code pundits gospel and is now publicly bashing an open source project that he admits he hasn't even tried to use yet.
I think this really should have been discussed offline via email.
Some people just need a reminder when they move into unproductive-detail territory. I know that no one wants to babysit but they aren't going to change if no one communicates this to them (and some people just won't change).
40 comments
[ 472 ms ] story [ 2830 ms ] threadRob is making confusing comments himself: "Massive is pretty much "done" although a few things come in from time to time", but then "End of life. I think I said it's finished - meaning done". EOL and complete/stable are not the same thing.
Sure, some of the questions may be silly, but it's nothing huge to complain about. If you end up telling your users "Please - use something else and don't come back." you're the problem. The response could've been "I will not spend more time documenting this project or answering questions about it, there is no mailing list. Closing issue." and everyone could be so much more happy at the end.
Rob said 'done', the commenter interpreted this as 'end of life', which is both clueless (in that way that corporate-worldview meets actual programmer can be) and borderline insulting.
Well, quite, as the entire conversation makes very clear. Rob doesn't say it was end of life, he said it was finished. He says "End of life." at the beginning of the para here to headline this part of his reply.
"If you end up telling your users "Please - use something else and don't come back." you're the problem."
He's not telling his users to get lost. His users are very happy and have used this project for ages and at massive scale because it's stable and it works. He's telling one particular user to get lost, a user that doesn't even understand how github works.
I stand by my opinion though. If you tell this to any single user, you're just being a mean person for no reason and you are the reason they are unlikely to understand what the issue is about. Maybe that user just read the message and wrote to people he knows "I'm never using opensource projects from github, and this maintainer is the reason." - how does that situation improve in the community?
Rob could end it in so many different ways that would be less aggressive. He didn't even say "learn how github/FOSS works and then check the project again", just "don't come back". It sounds like it's us-vs-them and "they" cannot be expected to learn and improve.
Rob doesn't owe this user anything. Nothing. Not even a reply.
He's being nice by responding at all. The passive-aggressive undertone to the user's questions - trying to evaluate the project to use it, and freeload on Rob's work, rather than take it as a starting point for further customization and personal stewardship, while criticizing things like performance before he's measured anything - this is pretty hard to swallow.
Rob may have responded to the cluelessness a little harshly, but it's hard to hold everything back when you're in a conversation with someone like this. And I don't blame him, because like I said, the guy wasn't owed anything.
Users like this aren't the "customers" for a piece of code like this. This is a seed file that you hack and customize for your purposes; it's not a library that you simply link in, or pull from upstream on a regular basis. The right thing to say to a user like this is: go away; this is not for you.
The what?
Of course the idea that there is no mailing list for Massive where this sort of internet banter can occur...well that's exactly why there is no mailing list.
What would you say they're moving towards? I have to shamefully admit that I never learned LINQ, preferring to write and use raw SQL(which can be unwieldy if you're dealing with the type of database that could really use an ORM), but I didn't know there was something else that trumps LINQ?
That seems totally insane.
haha seriously? He's the "problem"? What problem? He is the author and owner of the repo in question, and he can do pretty much whatever the hell he wants within that repo. The other guy is entitled to exactly on extra large serving of "nothing whatsoever".
If you have some freeloading, non contributing imbecile that randomly stops by to tell you how you did it all wrong, and when are you going to make it so that it is more to this guys liking, the only problem I see is the random twat.
Was there a particular reason you linked this?
vs.
"Here's a goal. We've reached it, but look at all the other pretty bells and whistles we may have overlooked! We can't be done when there could be some cooler way of doing stuff or if we missed some architectural edge-case."
Yeah, sure, you could argue that this is a failure in communication from the original coder to the audience, but it speaks to a focus on something other than getting the job done. Once you head down the lane of "but what about X?", you no longer have a clear mission to accomplish.
This complaint really has nothing to do with open source and is more about the frustration of interacting with other developers who believe they are right about something for which they are in part ignorant. That is going to happen pretty often.
I really hope this is just anger talking and not Rob being serious, he is wickedly good and I learn quite a bit from reading his code. Hoping to see more in the future.
So .NET developers stumble at times when they get involved with open source projects. Sometimes badly. (Sometimes they really shine, too.)
But then again, that is just what I get from this short "discussion", and I don't know what are the stuffs that the author has put up with maintaining the project till now. I can easily imagine demanding emails from people taking open source projects for granted.
I agree with the entitlement sentiment however. I know no one else who uses .Net who has ever contributed anything other than whining and issue reports to an OSS project inside a typical MS consumer company. Never a patch committed back, never an improvement. Many companies I've worked for forbid such a thing and the only motivation to use the project in the first place is solely that it was free and no one had to go through a PO process.
This is however changing but there are still a lot of pre-OSS managerial types out there.
I suspect Rob's post was the final paper cut hence the explosion.
I mean, take me. Sift through my comment history here and you'll see that I'm not really much of an OSS guy. I'm selfish enough, or at least self-interested enough not to hand out my work for free. But even I have put in a handful of pull requests for .NET open source projects (and have released a few projects of my own).
There's a lot of room in the gap between me and "open source devotee". I wouldn't be surprised to find that there are a ton of guys there that happen to be good at stuff on the Microsoft stack.
It's frustrating.
Maybe the real issue is so many people starting OSS without actual understanding of the consequences?
Those people would go insane in common-lisp land, as most libraries have been "done" for quite some time.
He receives feedback from a slightly naieve person to a project that he hasn't committed to in almost a year.
He proceeds to throw a tantrum on twitter leading his 17 thousand followers to make fun of a random well meaning open source contributor.
Class act.