November 08, 2007
Smart Questions

The usually smart Charles Arthur make a classic mistake here - GrowlMail screwed up your Mail so it keeps crashing? Yeah, but what should the developers do? - approaching an open source developer for help in a bad mood and with a sense of entitlement.

Remember, when you ask an OSS developer for support, what you are actually doing is asking a stranger for a favour. Now, the fact that they are releasing open source probably means that they are the sort of person who's likely to help out a stranger, but if you come across as unconstructivly critical, uncooperative, or just plain unfriendly, the developer has nothing to lose by just turning her back.

The canonical work on getting help from OSS developers is of course ESR's How To Ask Questions The Smart Way.

Posted to Open source by Simon Brunning at November 08, 2007 09:54 AM
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