This is why you don’t announce future changes until they’re essentially ready to go out the door. Apple used to understand this better than most. Until you build the feature, you’ll have people asking you constantly when it’ll be done. After you build it, you’ll have people complaining that it doesn’t work exactly like they imagined it in their head. If you end up not building it and say so, you’ll get attacked for it, even by people who never knew about the plans before the cancellation.

Keep quiet about internal plans only you can affect. Let features requests come to you, monitor interest in those, and reply if they’re interesting or not feasible, so you can discuss and figure out what would work best for your users. Engage but don’t commit unless you’re certain something will happen.

I’m surprised the conversation hasn’t devolved to a bigger mess yet (maybe it’s being well moderated). It’s a shame they’re having to preemptively lock issues, but I completely get it. It’s exhausting having to deal with abuse on public forums when you’re on the receiving end and always have to keep your conposure.

I think I agree with you for discrete product releases, but for ongoing SaaS and moreso PaaS, it's helpful for integrations to have some visibility on your roadmap. I'm might just write a hack workaround for some issue if I have a belief that in 2024 you'll solve X -- I've got bigger fish to fry. But if I know you've removed it from your roadmap and it was planned by me, I can put it on mine to resolve. Surprising me with features means more often than I care to admit I write something to solve a problem, use it for a few months, and then vendor comes out with a solution to it that's close enough and better supported so I toss out code -- with a roadmap I could have avoided overlapping efforts.

But I'm more on the operational side - so I care more than most about the integrations with lots of vendors, different PoV's may of course differ.

There was a time when the dream of open source was healthy and strong. GitHub was a big part of the movement. So it shouldn't be surprising that they did more of their planning in the open than a company like Apple.

There are tradeoffs with secrecy. Trust me when I tell you, secrecy comes at a cost. It limits the flow of ideas, even within your own organization.

I'm tempted to agree with you anyways, since I've been in the situation before where we wanted to change things we were making while we were making them. You don't want to give off the impression that you don't know what you're doing.

Honestly, this kinda goes back to agile vs. waterfall too. It's all about defining requirements and meeting them.