It's the Worst Time to Go Open Source Because So Many Stupid People Will See It

Junior Bontognali summed up what most people think about most other people – especially after the U.S. presidential election and Dash for iOS going Open Source: people in general are not ready for generous behavior.

Bogdan’s Dash for iOS is on GitHub now. One tweet highlighting an ugly if statement got lots of attention. One twitter user suggested cutting off Bogdan’s fingers. That’s not a real threat, of course. It’s just a stupid joke. But suddenly you’re in 4th grade again and everyone is making stupid jokes because someone pulled down someone else’s pants.

The thing is, Bogdan of Kapeli is too busy to accept pull requests that don’t add features. Maybe because testing these for regressions is pretty time consuming without and end-user benefit. Who knows. So he already turned down a pull request that would fix the aforementioned if-statement – and many others.

Dash probably isn’t ready for Open Source, either. A Swift library as simple as ReSwift took us over a month to port to Swift 3. Maintenance is time-consuming, no matter how big or small the project. Complaining is stupid and childish, but that’s the noise we have to deal with if we don’t want to be stupid and childish ourselves.

I don’t think everyone’s grown-up enough for democracy. I only hear about 3rd wave feminism and presidential elections in the U.S. from YouTube. Junior quoted Evelyn Beatrice Hall, and that applies just nicely to all the hate that’s going ‘round:

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

It seems lots of people with the power to act in public space don’t want to defend anything except their own self-loathing and self-interest. (Looking at you, “safe space” discussions.) If you read my previous ramblings about morals, you will notice that I usually point out that bitching doesn’t help. It will only strengthen victim mentality. Only doing will improve the situation. That’s why I won’t stop open-sourcing code and I’m looking forward to getting feedback by amazing people. The majority of not-so-amazing people on the internet have to be filtered out. It’s worth the effort to reach the good folks.