That's my biggest gripe with open source software. It's not really the open source part that's bad, but when projects turn into major projects with a substantial user base, I think the owners have an obligation not to delude their users into thinking they have more say than they actually do. Plenty of big projects leave their issue trackers public and have docs that encourage community contribution, yet effectively ignore user submissions unless perhaps someone with a name raises an issue. I completely agree that allowing users to waste their time believing their issue or pull request can make a difference is actually worse than not allowing public submissions in the first place.

I'm not sure why I seem to be in the minority on this. Maybe I've just had bad luck in that most of the issues and PRs I've submitted to open source have been ignored. Hell, I'd prefer a "thanks but no thanks" or even "fuck you" over radio silence. The typical response to this frustration of mine is "just fork the code, bro", which is absurd because forking should be a last resort for software that thrives from having a community.

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bonoboTP 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> thrives from having a community.

Does it? I think a lot of software projects which are not as huge as the Linux kernel etc. thrive best with a tight core development team, and not from a "community" if you mean that word beyond "users".

Look at it from the point of view of a maintainer. Not sure if you've ever tried. People want to pull your software towards a million incompatible directions. They write some big patch and then get angry if you don't merge it.

My advice: consult the maintainers first whether they agree with your idea and whether they are open to considering your submission. You still won't have a guarantee that it will be accepted, because that's their final say. But at least you won't spend effort coding up something that they could already tell you they don't want to have in their software.

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zephen 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> which is absurd because forking should be a last resort for software that thrives from having a community.

This is true, of course, but having a community is completely orthogonal to whether software is open or closed source.

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	▲	bonoboTP 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The two are correlated which does encourage that mistaken view. Github culture generally blends these two, having an open issue tracker, pull requests etc. as well as the code right there, often with a free license. But you can very much allow bug reports and feature requests in public while developing proprietary software and you can also very much work on a project alone or with a small group without being open to random patches, contributions or requests and be open source / FLOSS. The key definitional question is the license, not any of the cultural stuff.