I fear there’s been a misunderstanding.
Judging from your comment, I see that you [read my email/looked at my source code/downloaded my library]. I’m glad to hear you’ve taken an interest in what I’m doing: it means that I’m probably doing something interesting or useful, which is good. But the [demand for a fix/unconstructive feedback/derogatory discouragement/flame] you sent me implies that you don’t really get our relationship.
Now, I don’t want to go all Zed Shaw on you, but the way you’ve come at me is like a girlfriend who’s asking me to fix her stopped-up toilet. The reality is that you just took the toilet I set out on the curb with a “FREE” sign, installed it in your house, discovered it’s stopped up, and now you’ve come back and asked me to fix it like I owe you something. You’re not my girlfriend: you’re someone who took my free toilet. Plunge it yourself.
Now, I appreciate you taking my free toilet. That is, I find it a bit gratifying that you’re taking an interest in the open source project. But the reality is that I’m an open source developer: nobody’s paying me to do this work, so insofar as this project is concerned, I work for myself and for free. I’m doing it because I find it interesting or useful to release my project. I wrote CacheMap for JConch because I got tired of re-writing that code at client sites, and I wanted to be able to pull it in. I wrote the Perl text cipher libraries because I wanted a simple way to obfuscate cookie values for a Perl CGI script. GORM Labs was just seeing how hard it was to push that codebase. And I wrote Autobase because I saw Grails heading the route of Rails migrations, and I hate Rails migrations to a point which is downright unhealthy for my soul. Note that nowhere in these explanations do I refer to you: it’s nothing personal, you just don’t factor in to my decision to work on these things.
Now, I’ve done a lot of dreary work on these projects and I don’t have a monetization plan for any of this software, so I figured I might as well share it. I tend to share under the WTFPL, because most of the code that I crank out is stuff that someone else could crank out pretty quick if they decided to bother, so it really doesn’t have a ton of value. If you want to take my code and use it in your framework or application, have a blast. If you want to create derivative works, be my guest. I’d appreciate an e-mail or a hat-tip in the source code or a link to SmokejumperIT, but whatever. The reality of the situation is that it’s a rare open source project I’d bother enforcing the licensing on, so any license I’d drop on there is really just a recommendation anyway1.
But the tone of the WTFPL should give you a pretty good hint about my attitude towards free support: I’m not going to do it. Sure, I may do a bit of work here or there because I am (in the end) a nice guy or I might find the problem interesting, but the way you came at me—as if I owed you something and should have jumped up and fixed your bug right away—shows that you expected much more. And there’s a reason why I don’t do free maintenance: I tried doing things that way before, and I ended up losing a contract and getting nothing out of it. To be clear: I used to care more and put in more free work on my open source projects, but then I found myself having spent too much time on free, not-feeding-me-and-my-family work and losing out on my contractual, feeding-me-and-my-family work. Worse, I found myself growing to hate my open source projects, because they weren’t interesting or fun anymore. At one point, I seriously considered stopping all my open source development altogether because my heart just wasn’t in it. And the only thing I got out of that bleak situation was fewer JIRA tickets and the occasional complement. Forget that noise.
Now, all of this may seem a bit harsh, but let’s analyze the relationship a bit closer. For me to do work for you, there’s got to be some kind of social bond; some kind of give-and-take; a bi-directional relationship wherein both parties have given and received. At the point when you’ve come at me with your comment, our relationship consists of one point of interaction: I’ve put work into a project and released it, and you’ve taken the project. See the lopsidedness? You’re not doing me a favor by taking the project: I have no social bond with you because you decide to take my free toilet. If you want me to do some work, a kind of quid pro quo is required up-front: some sign that you’re in the relationship, and the relationship will be give-and-take. I don’t keep careful books on how much I’ve given or taken from people, but in your case, I don’t have to: I’ve given something, you’ve given nothing, and now you’re demanding more. That’s not the kind of relationship I care to be a part of.
There’s lots of ways you can build a better relationship with me. You could try the sycophant route: stroking my ego and telling me how awesome I am and my project is. You could try the buddy route: buy me lunch or a beer and chat me up and then ask me to do some work later. You could do something awesome which I want to support (like GroovyMag or G-Func), and then sell me that I’m helping that awesome thing by helping you out. You could even go The Traditional, and hire me as a consultant to work on your project, putting me in a situation where building out the open source project is useful to me.
The best way to get me to help out, though, is to show that you’re interested in driving the open source project forward, too. That not only do you have a consumer relationship to the project, but you’re willing to be a producer. If Vaclav Pech came to me and asked me to do some work, I’d do it: but the guy put in serious hours building out the BackgroundThread plugin. And Hamlet D’Arcy produces such astoundingly useful stuff that I’d bend over backwards for him.
But you? You haven’t done anything for me except [knock my interest/critique from your armchair/whine about the API/complain it doesn't work]. That’s not helpful, and you haven’t sold me on the idea that I should care. Given that you’ve already got a gripe, you’ve even got an obvious piece of work to be doing: fix your gripe, and then share the fix with me2. I even make it easy: my code is mostly on GitHub, where you can fork the project at the push of the button. For my stuff in Subversion, feel free to create yourself a branch and go nuts. Whenever you’re done, let me know and I’ll take the fix: that’ll go a long, long way towards improving our relationship.
And if you don’t care to improve the relationship, that’s fine with me, too. Just don’t bitch about my free toilet being clogged.
Sincerely and on behalf of all open source developers who care to opt-in to this license,
~~ Robert.
PS: Have you taken a look at my Retainer service arrangement? It’s nominally for Grails, but we can do that for any open source project of mine you’re using.
1 Note that if you encounter an open source library of mine that’s licensed under something different, I actually mean it. Or it’s a derivative work of someone else who may actually mean it. Either way, you probably want to be paying attention: GPL means GPL.
2 If your gripe is that I shouldn’t be implementing the functionality or working on the project at all, how about you just go away altogether? I have no vested interest in you using my code, so I really don’t care if you don’t want to.
32 Comments
I am sympathetic to this rant — I’ve been there too. But there’s another way that freeloading, whining users do you a service: they bring you information about how people want to use your project in other environments and for other purposes, and this in turn gives your project a chance to win more mindshare. Mindshare is good for both selfish and altruistic reasons. Obviously the more people use your project the better your reputation gets. But also, having one tool that does more things better than the others in its niche is a win for people who need something like that tool. Open source is littered with thousands of prototype-level tools that are broken for all kinds of cases outside their author’s original environment. The effort a user wastes inspecting all the free toilets out there for possible ways they might clog after installation can easily be more than it’s worth. I’ve been there too.
I don’t mind people freeloading (that’s why I share under the license I do!), and I love it when people tell me how they’re using my projects, even if they don’t offer a single line of code back to the community. When Michael Kimsal asked me on WebDev Radio if I had any closing words, I ended by telling the audience to give constructive feedback to those open source projects that they used: thank a developer whose free work and generous nature you’re benefiting from.
I do mind it when people don’t engage me or my project at all, and then come out of the woodwork with demands or even insults. As I just told Brian, I woke up this morning with four requests for me to put in free work on a variety of my projects. Two of those I put on my mental ToDo list, and two of those I felt encroached upon and largely ignored. This post (which I don’t really see as a “rant” per se) grew out of that interesting contrast.
And I definitely agree that we (as open source developers) need to consolidate our efforts. Just because a problem is fun or interesting or challenging to code doesn’t mean we need Yet Another Redundant Implementation. I killed off a couple of projects already because of it, and I’ll probably be killing off some other things (like the CacheMap on JConch) because another library with more mindshare provided the same implementation (in that case, Google Collections).
Another thing I want to clarify, because apparently there’s some Y-Combinator commentators who seem mistaken: I consider JIRA tickets and other useful bug reports to be constructive. Reporting bugs and requesting API improvements are very cool: it’s the life-blood of projects like GORM Labs. But just because you submit tickets and bug reports, you can’t expect I’m going to rush away from my day job to address it, or even burn my precious free time on it. If you want that behavior from me, you’re going to have to engage me in some way. And that’s the point of this post.
I think a large chunk of this is a sense of entitlement gone too far. Tough love, good sir, tough love.
Looks like a missing “not” to me, about half way through the rant:
(emphasis mine).
Loved the rant, BTY. :-D
Nicely put, Robert. I couldn’t help but chuckle every time you repeated “free toilet.”
Awww… you had me at the anchor tag…
You know what’s sad? In the last 3 months 100% of the Groovy code I’ve written is for the groovy project, the wiki, or my blog. I have no idea why I do it. New twitter followers is a poor reward.
Hamlet! You should be writing for GroovyMag too! (hint hint!) :)
Indeed Robert… although I’m not sure I’d like our code to a used toilet!
How about an experimental brand new spacecraft prototype left on the lawn for all to try. YMMV. You may get to the moon. You may end up as galactic dust.
What we offer is, in my view, usually exciting and forward-thinking – and at the very least enhances productivity in a big way for people. Else they wouldn’t use it.
So really it comes down to… “I want your productivity gains for free, and then some please?”.
It’s funny how when somebody codes 95% of something you need, that one immediately expects them to also complete the final 5% for you even if they don’t need it. Human nature I guess. “It’s YOUR head that is in the code so its easiest for YOU to do it”
In reality of course, the hours – maybe even days – it would take someone else to get their head into the code and try to fix the 5% themselves (and contrib it?) is nothing compared to the initial effort and maintenance in most cases – and yet people, businesses in particular, are loathe to dedicate this small fraction of the time to contributing themselves.
This is all time that could have been spent fixing the bug I reported.
Dear Mr. Developer,
You might think of your open source project as a free toilet you put outside. The problem is that when I took this toilet home, it didn’t work like anything I have ever seen before. It was more of a duct-taped diy space shuttle from the soviet era with all the instructions in archaic Klingon.
You might think of this as a free toilet. I think of it as one of the best business cards you can put out there. It puts Robert Fischer on my radar. It makes me think, ‘hrm, I have a question about GORM, I wonder if Robert Fischer or Burt Beckwith can help me out with it.’
If you shut your door on me, who’s gonna buy your book on GORM? Who are you going to talk to in New Orleans? Who is going to anxiously wait for your volume on Polyglot programming ( whatever that is )?
I think that any help you might give me now is investing in the future me that is going to be writing plugins and helping others. I might not be helping you pay your bills right now, but I might be the one that gives you that brilliant contract in the future. Or I might be the next Marc Palmer, Graeme Rocher or Marcel Overdijk.
You know what would be great? If you put out a list of things that you would want us to help you with. Look at the way the community is helping test Grails 1.2M1, we were too busy getting on with our lives to realize that no-one was doing it. The call for help came out and people from the community stepped up. How can we help if we don’t know what you need?
Just my $.02
Some dude from Canada
Robert,
Just wanted to say that I think this post is wonderfully written.
Having worked for a commercial open source company (Alfresco) before, we faced similar issues many times with our GPL community version – I think your post is amazingly nuanced.
And thanks for all your hard work, especially in the Grails community.
Cheers,
Jean
A perfect example of why you so often get what you pay for when you use open source in your projects.
I’ve been burned one time too many by using open source projects with no support, no schedule for updates, little to no documentation, and no commitment to fixing errors.
Every time, I’m sure the author thought he was giving me a ‘free toilet’. In reality, he put a ‘free’ sign on his trash and duped me into removing it for him.
The standard reply to this complaint has always been ‘do it yourself’ (or, in OSS lingo: ‘contribute’). Newsflash: I use third party components so I don’t *have* to do it myself. If your product doesn’t deliver, it’s usually easier to do it from scratch than trying to understand other peoples code.
Sure, it’s your game, and you can play it any way you want. Just keep this in mind: If you don’t want to be professional about your product, it’s basically useless.
It does take quite a bit out of you. I worked at a open source research group for a while and it can seem thankless work and never ending. Yet there is another side to it.. When a lot of people are testing your code it goes through a lot more testing and that is beneficial.
The most successful open source projects I have seen are the ones that have commercial support or the ownership is passed on somehow. You might want to try to pass some of your code onto communities that are interested. They will benefit and so will you if you continue to use this code. You lose control but the code lives on .. hey it is WTFPL anyway.
Thanks for the link to the WTFPL. I think I have a new favorite free software license.
A few days ago I blogged about exactly the same problem and announced similar counter-measures.
You know, I usually don’t mind a poor kid from South Africa doing a school project asking me a question. But people like that Tomas that commented above… shame on you! So let me get this straight: typically you have forum, JIRA, wiki, mailing lists and all sort of other channels to ask, prod, suggest and annoy people and you STILL want to send private e-mails and you STILL think that you are entitled to anything? I find that’s just as unbelievable as unprofessional and stupid. NOBODY owes you anything. ‘nough said.
The problem with passing it onto “the community” is that “the community” is an abstraction, and as an abstraction, it doesn’t tend to do a lot of committing into my source code repository.
I’ve put out calls for help a number of times (especially for Autobase) and am extremely receptive to anyone who wants to step in and contribute to these projects. I’d even be ecstatic if someone wanted to come in and drive some of them that require more work than I have time/funding for.
I’m more than willing to share because I don’t do open source for fame or ego or whatever: I’ve long since known that I don’t have the skills or the cult-follower-inspiring charisma or the Satanic pact or whatever it is that moves people from “open source developer” to “software developer micro-celebrity”. I do open source because it solves a problem for me, and I think it might help solve a problem for someone else. Or because it’s interesting, and I think someone else might find the stuff interesting, too.
The books I choose to do because 1) something along those lines need to be written1, and 2) it acts as a way to fund exploration deeper into a topic with which I’m already familiar, but want to really master. And I’m not naive: I realize that I’ve got a reputation, and that reputation helps sell my books, but I think that’s more from the people I got to know through Carol.com, MinneBar, Groovy.MN (including Refactr), my work helping out on the Grails-User mailing list, and my general inability to keep my mouth shut where-ever I go. I see actively hanging out with people/groups cooler, smarter, and more productive than me to be responsible for my reputation, not an particular open source project. Autobase didn’t get me working on the GORM book: someone I met through Michael Kimsal did.
And since my open source projects don’t actually make me money, I don’t care to be professional about them. Professional takes effort and professional requires superficiality and marketing. Professional is, in short, a pain in the ass which would have a zero ROI for all the open source projects I’ve thrown off. So why would I bother?
My open source projects I do because I want do do them: because they’re interesting to me or they solve problems for me or they make my life better. While the WTFPL doesn’t include a warranty disclaimer2, I do not imply and or promise that my code is fit for your particular purpose when I release it. And if you think my code is trash or unprofessional, then that’s fine: don’t use it. And if you can do what I did but better, that’s awesome: I’d love to see how you did it, and I’d be more than happy to bounce people from my project to your code.
1 While Grails Persistence with GORM and GSQL is good for what it is (a post-quick start and practically-focused, unit-test-heavy guide to GORM), I’ve got a view for a different and more dynamic kind of book on GORM. But that one will have to wait until Polyglot Programming comes out. :)
2 I figure Assumption of Risk has to kick in somewhere around “You just DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO.”
@Ole
This line in your comment really bugs me:
This is exactly the kind of nonsense that I was addressing in the original post: this sense that you’re somehow doing me a favor. Yeah, if you ever engage with me (or the surrounding community) in some constructive way, then you using my library has value. Otherwise, our relationship is on parity (if that): you’re explicitly not doing me a favor.
Here’s what really got me, though: you’ve been “duped” into “removing it for him”? The GitHub or GoogleCode page somehow “duped” you? And it “duped” you into “removing it for him”? Oh, that’s so sweet of you to pull down those bytes: those bytes were just sitting around, cluttering up the poor developer’s server, and now that you’ve copied them to your computer, life is so much better for that poor developer! You’re a saint!
This way of talking betrays a consumer mindset to software which simply has no place in the plethora of small and mid-sized open source projects that are out there. If you use one of these pieces of software, you’re also taking a bit of ownership over it and expected to work for your dinner. If you can work the system to get away without doing that, good for you and enjoy. But nobody owes you anything because you’re using software for free, and it’s downright ungrateful and rude and wrong to try to shove the relationship into a consumer one when you’ve paid nothing for it, not in money and not in sweat.
But you’re right, Ole: you get what you pay for with these open source software projects—you’re getting sweat, and you’re expected to pay back with sweat. That sweat might be debugging and submitting patches, it might be adding new APIs, it might even just be hanging out on a mailing list and helping out other users or writing blog posts to drive more people to use the same library. If you’re aghast at the thought of paying with sweat, then don’t: stick to commercial software relationships, and hope that you’ll get better support from someone whose loyalty to their software is defined by how much money they can squeeze out of its users. That even works sometimes.
@Tomas
I’ll put out an explicit “Call for Help” post on Tuesday here on my blog.
@Matt – all I’m saying is that in your zeal to slay help vampires, you might also end up discouraging those who genuinely want to help. There are all sorts of developers. The guys in mailing lists who go “TELL ME HOW TO DO THIS AND GIVE ME THE CODE NOW” , and the ones who simply are stuck. Sometimes they look exactly like each other.
Why are you shaming me for asking questions?
@Tomas/@Matt
I don’t think Matt is quite digging at the same spot as my post (although it’s an interesting tangent), and I don’t think Tomas is the kind of person this post was targeted at. I fear there really has been a misunderstanding between you two! :)
Heck, maybe I did overreact. But I still see a lot of misunderstandings about open the source development model float around on this very messages thread alone.
For example, there is nothing wrong with asking anything whatsoever on a user forum. I love forums, mailing lists, JIRA, etc. That’s because it at least prevents me from having to answer the same question twice against my will. More importantly, it allows others in the community (define it as you like) to chip in too. Answers on these public locations can also be easily searched for by search engines. That being said, whether or not you mail directly or push forward some urgent request on the mailing list, nobody owes you anything! We have a couple of saints in the community that are answering each and every question and they turn these questions into JIRA cases so we prevent the question from being asked in the future.
Then again, I did release my software under LGPL years ago. It matters in the sense that it explains the rules of the game to all involved. Like the GPL it’s a quid-pro-quo license and describes an open invitation to collaborate on the project. Put this in stark contrast with the WTFPL were it’s kinda obvious that you are pretty much on your own.
However, in both cases, I will continue to violently dispute Tomas’ suggestion that I’m somehow responsible or approachable in case anything goes wrong. Not even Oracle and Microsoft are responsible and approachable despite the fact that you pay top dollar. If something goes wrong all you have in the best case is an expensive promise that someone will try to help you along.
Also Tomas, you are trying to spin the issue around. I’m sure Robert is perfectly capable of managing his own career without anyone’s help. Just because you need help it doesn’t give you a blank check to pile on a bunch of assumptions. Take for example Linus Torvalds : he has always refused a job for a Linux vendor. He has very good reasons for doing so too. Getting paid for development or not has nothing to do with the case either. I *am* being paid to work on Kettle, quite well in fact. However, I still don’t owe anyone besides my employer anything at all.
2 years ago there was a lot of fuss about the way KDE 4.0 was pushed out. People complained that this was not a professional way to release software. They were right. It wasn’t. It was the open source way of doing things. IMHO 2 years after they proved that the model works and that code got cranked out at an astounding rate. It took Microsoft 3 years longer to do a similar thing with Vista.
In short: the vampires I’m slaying are the people that refuse to understand the basic rules. I would rather not have them in any community I’m part of. For those people that don’t understand the most basic rules, I wrote that blog entry ;-)
@Matt
I definitely agree with you re: open source releases/culture/etc., and that the “professional” trap is a bad one. I view people trying to make their open source project “professional” about the same way I view those “therapists” who try to make gay people straight: while there might be the occasional notable success-like result, at the end of the day, you’re really fighting against the nature of the situation, and maybe things would be better off if you just rolled with it.
I stepped in because I didn’t see Tomas as suggesting that I had to rush out and help people (that was Ole): just that there’s an upside to cultivating users of an open source software project which I under-represent in this article. Which is true, although I don’t see it as being to the same extent that Tomas seems to think: I don’t, for instance, credit Autobase with many—if any—GORM book sales (and people who did buy it for that reason were probably sorely disappointed).
I’d like to add this link into the discussion. There is definitely a difference in culture between Linux and Windows, between open source and commercial software.
“You get what you pay for” is true, in both cases- but what gets missed is that there are ways to pay for software that don’t involve money. Specifically, with open source, you pay time (and effort). If you want a friendly, helpful community surrounding a project, if you want new features (especially ones that address your particular problems), it’s up to you to provide it. You can skate by, not contribute, just benefit from the work other people put in, and not get called on it, but end result will be less than it could be. If you don’t like this deal, then don’t take it. There are lots of people who are willing to make you pay money, but not invest your time and effort into the project.
@Brian
It’s not just Linux vs. Windows — I see the same kind of sentiment in a fair bit of the business sector, too. A lot of them won’t even contribute back to open source software (whether in code, mailing list support, opening bug tickets, etc.) because of liability concerns or public relations message control or whatever, so people are trained to read books and to read docs and maybe to read source, but the idea of actually contributing back in any useful way is just off the table.
These same businesses instead pay major bucks to big-name vendors to have those vendors enhance their software: I was on a team that was shelling out enough money to get new APIs and administration UI into an app server, and for one of the big-name vendor’s developers to fly to our company site to work on our servers in order to get this bleeding-edge app server implemented on our dev box. Yet this company wouldn’t let me open JIRA tickets with patches for Hibernate, because it’d have to go through the battery of lawyers since that’s exposing the company’s intellectual property and opens up liability issues, and the company has decided that it wasn’t worth it.
That’s what taught me that I had to write my open source on my own time, and *then* I could pull it into my current client. But that also means I’m not billing for it, so it has to be something generally useful.
In our corporate culture (interpret that as you will), money is the only thing that has value. So any culture based around non-monetary values is, of course, going to conflict.
Note that the corporate refusal to “give back” (unless contractually obligated) is what caused the Great Unix Schism years ago. Companies like Sun, HP, etc. took the source code to BSD Unix and improved in various ways (fixing bugs, adding features, etc.) and then didn’t give the changes back. So over time the details of their OS offerings diverged. Now, the incompatibilities were never as great as were advertised, but they were a problem, and they did hurt the popularity of Unix. I still have a button that reads “You are in a maze of twisty little unix versions, all different”.
Which is one the reasons I like the GPL myself- it was explicitly designed to prevent another great Unix schism, and to force some sort of payment-in-kind for value received. Note that if you own the copyright of a work, you can license it however you feel like. Simply because you released it GPL doesn’t mean that you can’t also sell commercial licenses to the same source code. Of course, if you accept patches from other people, you no longer have sole copyright ownership (the people you accept patches from have partial copyright ownership), so relicensing projects like Linux are practically impossible now. But for projects where you are the sole author and likely to remain that way…
if you don’t force them to pay, they won’t pay. And what they won’t pay for, they don’t value. And if you don’t like the cost of using GPL software, don’t use it.
The money vs. non-money emphasis was precisely the issue. After all, from the standpoint of the company I was working at, it cost real, hard money (in the form of lawyer’s salaries) to prime the pump for open source software contributions to flow out: there wasn’t any real, hard money coming in from these open source contributions to offset it. The best you could argue is some vaguery about saving time correlating into saving money on developer/contractor costs. But even that was pretty shaky, since there was an “in house” version of the software which contained extensions, so you really had to argue something about engaging the wider community.
Which, unfortunately, translated into manager’s ears into “Your people suck, and someone else out there *might* contribute something that fix some of their suck”. Not exactly a position of strength to be debating from.
This all nicely explains why I’m working for a Commercial Open Source company.
We don’t expect our customers to “give back” to the community, we’ll do that for them.
We get customers because we are cheaper and better than the closed source alternatives. (especially in this economic climate) Ultimately, that’s where it usually comes down to. From prior experience I have to once again agree with Robert that as a lonely consultant you have little to nothing to say in this whole cost/benefit equation.
Thanks, loved the post.
I propose we replace “free as in ‘beer’ ” with “free as in ‘free toilet’ “…
:)
There’s an interesting and rather contemporary post by Zed Shaw that expresses similar sentiments to what’s here: Why I (A/L)GPL. Thanks to Tomas Lin (@tomaslin) for the head’s up.
Hi Robert,
A friend pointed me to your blog post after I tweeted this. I don’t think I’ve ever used any of your open source projects, though I’m interested in jconch. Nevertheless, I thought I’d thank you for your contributions, open source developers make my life much easier.
I used GitHub for the first time a few weeks ago, it’s awesome isn’t it! Fork, make your fix, send pull request, easy!! Hopefully even some of these armchair critics will one day realise that it’s easier for them to contribute than to write inflammatory emails/posts.
And the ones I hate the most… are the ones that make it out that we’re all in this open source battle against proprietary software together, and that by not fixing their bug/implementing their feature, you’re not pulling your weight. Their comments usually start with “If you want your project to be taken seriously, and to be able to compete with proprietary product X, then…”
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[...] Here’s the original “Free Toilet” post, and my response to Burt’s [...]
[...] This does damage to the Grails ecosystem, starting with a lack of trust in plugins and ending with burnt out plugin developers angrily reclaiming their free time. So, how do we help the original developer make time for plugins, or how can we get other [...]
[...] @ 5:29 pm Recently (or rather over the course of the last half year or so), there has been quite some discussion about how the Grails community responds to open source contributions, mainly with [...]