Why I Haven’t Fixed Your Issue Yet

I agree with most of those, although I&#x27;d add a bullet point to the agreement:<p>- If I don&#x27;t have the time or interest to support the project any longer I agree to reach out to trusted contributors and give them commit rights, or put a clear notice on the readme: &quot;This project is not actively maintained&quot; so users can make an informed choice

It&#x27;s not clear whether this is getting sincere upvotes despite that the page is currently failing to load or ironic upvotes because the page is currently failing to load.<p>In any event, he&#x27;s not fixing your issue yet because he has limited free time and, apparently, has issues of his own to fix.

Thought the blank page was the point he was trying to make in that a blank canvas, editor, notebook, etc is daunting when you first get started and you can easily find excuses to keep putting it off. But apparently there&#x27;s a technical issue here. Or is that intentional?

Cached version here: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;webcache.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;search?site=&amp;source=hp&amp;q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.michaelbromley.co.uk%2Fblog%2F529%2Fwhy-i-havent-fixed-your-issue-yet&amp;oq=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.michaelbromley.co.uk%2Fblog%2F529%2Fwhy-i-havent-fixed-your-issue-ye" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;webcache.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;search?site=&amp;source=hp...</a>

I feel the pain. I maintain a couple of slightly popular repos and the issues are sometimes overwhelming, even more when I have to debug some issue in an environment I don&#x27;t own (iOS) or when the issue runs deep (PhantomJS issue =&gt; testing issue =&gt; now my issue).

So the Bing cache is good and the article worth reading<p>This is however the money shot:<p>&gt;&gt; how many parts of your company’s product are coupled to the lifestyle and priorities of some lone, unpaid package maintainer? It’s something I have to think about too – in my day-job I build software on top of many FOSS libraries, many of which are probably maintained by people in similar circumstances to my own.<p>Given that my day job builds on (last count) 953 npm packages, most of which are probably different authors, not to mention servers, backend etc etc, I do really worry we are finding OSS backwards.<p>Good luck to the OP and his young family. And perhaps GitHub can set up a &quot;pay me a days freelance rates work for issues fixed&quot; feature

He misses another way to get bugs fixed in open source software: Pay a developer to fix them. However that does raise the problem that it&#x27;s hard to find a competent developer to do piecework (easy to find an <i>in</i>competent developer of course). All the good open source developers are employed.

Tangent: Looking forward to the resurgence of static page generators.

Heh, I have an issue filed in a repository of his too, but I had a suitable workaround.<p>As a maintainer of a major library myself, I completely concur with the article - while I don&#x27;t have a baby, I am a long distance runner, as well as someone who directs albums of music. I also like to socialize as well, and every now and then I give talks (oftentimes traveling to give them), interview (even having excessive time lost to take home projects), and experiment with new technology or contribute to other open source projects.<p>I think one thing people need to do is help us help you. It saves us a lot of mental energy, as well as speeds things up. If you can, filing a pull request would be great too if you understand the parameters of the problem

Funny, I had exactly the reciprocal experience with Fritzing, I spent 3 weeks (I know, I&#x27;m slow) developing a significant improvement in one of the most important part on a software they make money on. And one year later, the PR is still not merged.

I think money might be a good motivator in such circumstances. Maybe Github should think about integrating &quot;paid requests&quot;. I think we would definitely have more open source software at better quality.

I think this could be a valid reason - I know there are issues in some of my projects that I won&#x27;t get around to because I may have lost interest in but which if someone would pay me to fix an issue or two I&#x27;d glady fix it:<p>&quot;Because you are not offering me any money to fix it&quot;

Another good reason to have your blog be static pages compiled and served from FS. Worse is better.

Why not pass over management of the repository to someone else? Sounds like all sides would benefit.

I was pretty confused to be given a cursor on a web page with no content just a basic layout. Oh well.

It&#x27;s nice except for the one part where he says he has some responsibility to his users. He doesn&#x27;t. Not at all. That would be a one-way relationship or responsibility. If his users were paying him, then I could see some responsibility. If it&#x27;s free and&#x2F;or incomplete, it&#x27;s the users that have responsibility when they download it: be grateful for work done so far, make sure it works as intended, and so on.<p>FOSS developers shouldn&#x27;t feel guilty or responsible in the slightest for their users unless their users&#x27; success is part of the developers&#x27; lifelong goals. For instance, protecting liberty by making sure Tor and GPG work properly. Otherwise, screw them if they want something done but won&#x27;t contribute anything back.

Sorry, gonna try to fix...

Heh, looks like HackerNews hugs hard these days :-)

Someone has to write a script that archives pages automatically when they appear on HN.

Off topic, but to me this indicates a dev tool issue:<p>&quot;Do you know what I like to do in that time? Unfortunately for you, the answer is not &quot;fire up my IDE, get the build pipeline going, start a local dev server, ..<p>I pick my tools carefully, so that my hobby projects don&#x27;t feel like work. If I have to suffer through slow tools, then they feel like work, and then what&#x27;s the point in doing them? It&#x27;s supposed to be fun.<p>So I basically use vim and bash as the IDE and shell scripts for the build pipeline. Everything works quickly and reliably, on any machine.<p>I realize that not every project has that luxury. But for personal projects, if it requires shitty tools, I&#x27;m just not even going to bother in the first place, and then there are no bugs to fix.

&gt; fire up the build pipeline<p>He&#x27;s not lying about the role of weird build pipelines in making it harder to dive into a project (though it may not be the point he intended to make). Simplicity &amp; repeatability yields surprising dividends.

Empty page on my Android.

A (perhaps) related discussion: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=5686139" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=5686139</a>

FOSS, like paid software cant escape the economics of incentives.

If it&#x27;s that important hire someone who can and pay them to fix it, job done, everyone happy, move on :)

Yes you&#x27;re coding

because the database is down?

I&#x27;m getting a 500 error when the page tries to load the blog. I can&#x27;t see any text at all.

Because you have been making some silly JS-animation on your blog instead?

Why I haven&#x27;t read your blog post yet: Won&#x27;t show anything without javascript → meh, close that tab.

Opera Android: empty page with blinking cursor. That could be a reason for not fixing issues, the blank page syndrome :-) but I guess there is some technical problem going on.

Is it just me or is this website really buggy&#x2F;confusing. Some of the menus blog&#x2F;projects open to a blank page (with a cursor that does nothing?) and the other ones are just way to slow at producing the content... The time it takes for some page to artistically produce the readable content I&#x27;ve already clicked back button about 24 times.<p>I fail to see why this is on hacker news in the first place? Is this a demonstration of some web developers failing in new creative ways? (I saw some other interactive CV stuff that was also not only buggy but also just creative in a _bad_ way few days before...)<p>And oh yeah, if this is supposed to be some kind of &quot;recruiting&quot; tool to advocate the creator of the website in question.. If I was the recruiter, I would consider this website against him. Just my 2 € cents.

I dislike such posts.<p>Since mostly an issue is nothing but. Even if it won&#x27;t get fixed (directly).<p>Also some people in Open Source are akward. They tell me that they have limited resources in their project and they can&#x27;t fix it or won&#x27;t fix it or whatever. They don&#x27;t even think that I could try to fix my own issue. They better start a conversation that they have too less people and that this particular issue will be closed. They don&#x27;t even care if you&#x27;ve done some open source contributions already (even minor one&#x27;s) on another project &#x2F; language.<p>It&#x27;s like some people just don&#x27;t want your help, even if they told you.