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 AMOh, well, I'll settle for "usually smart".
I guess I was approaching yes, with a sense of annoyance, but also with a sense of "I've found a bug that doesn't seem to be mentioned, and pinned down the cause; can you think why it might occur?" The latter hasn't been addressed, which I think is everyone's loss.
I must say though that reading - or trying to read "How to ask questions the smart way", my reaction is to ask: isn't there a very much shorter version of this document, please?
Posted by: Charles on November 9, 2007 11:08 AMYeah - this is it. ;-)
Posted by: Simon on November 9, 2007 01:03 PM