Disclaimer
Not trying to blame anyone here. I‘m just taking an idea I‘ve read and spinning it further:
Intro
A lot of people use free open source software (foss), Linux being one of them. But a lot less actually help make this software. If I ask them why, they always say „I don’t have the coding skills!“.
Maybe its worth pointing out that you don‘t need them. In a lot of cases it’s better to not have any so you can see stuff with a „consumer view“.
In that situation you can file issues on github and similar places. You can write descriptions that non technical people can understand. You can help translate and so on, all depending on your skills.
Other reasons?
I‘d really like to know so the foss community can talk about making it worthwile for non coders to participate.
Thanks. I dont get the pragmatic part yet. Care to elaborate?
People suffer from limited attention. Trying to take a purely principled approach and investing the energy to give back to every project you may want to can become impractical. Especially if one had a busy family and professional life too, it may just not be worth it, however much someone may wish to help.
It’s just the organization of priorities, and simply put, sometimes a few minutes really is too much to ask in certain circumstances.
Thus, removing as many hurdles as possible is probably a worthy investment of a devs time if they want large amounts of feedback. Pragmatic, not based on any ideas of what might be right or wrong, but simply what is probably going to happen most of the time, with no consideration to why that might be or what might be better. Pragmatism is frequently unethical.
I agree. Giving back to every project you end up using as much as you gain from it is impractical but I‘m merely talking about giving back at all, either through work or through money.
So, do I understand correctly that you assume that a dev would usually go the way of least resistance hence pragmatic?
No, not necessarily. I don’t think a dev usually would, or even should. It depends entirely on why they’re working on whatever the project is. To put it in more mathematical terms, I’m essentially saying that the amount of feedback any particular dev receives on their project is going to be a function of only really two major variables: How many total users they have, and how convenient they make it to deliver the feedback to them.
Those two variables are most, but not all, of what governs what happens. They can do with that information whatever they wish. If they want a lot of feedback, they should make it easy. If they do not wish a lot, they should not make it easy. That’s all, really. It’s not particularly high level thinking or anything.
I think its a skill nonetheless. Boiling something down to a merely binary or the most basic structure is not something everyone can do. Thanks for elaborating. You might be a great fit if any form of “foss improvement pact” ever comes to existence. Because most people who have deep technical knowledge lack social skills and the other way around. But being able to think very laterally or change mindsets is rare.