 Hey guys just another backyard boomerant and today I wanted to talk about a question I got from a viewer here in the last day or two and I thought it would be great for one of these backyard boomerants. He asked, hey DT do you think that the open-source community listens to you and that's the way he put it and he was mainly talking about does the open-source community listen to me when I critique open-source projects open-source software things like the GNOME project for example I'm very critical of GNOME and he asked, hey do you think the open-source community actually listens to your criticisms and I think that's a great question I also think it's a little bit of a strange question to ask because I do think they listen I do think that they actually hear the criticisms not just from me because I have a big platform on YouTube but I think all these projects here you guys criticisms too when you go to github or gitlab open up an issue or you know you just hey can you add this feature can you change this this isn't working for me they hear you guys but 80% of the time they're not gonna do anything about it because just because you want this particular project or this piece of software to go one direction they may not agree with you so that's something a lot of people have a hard time accepting is they assume that when they decide hey I want this particular piece of software to do this I'm gonna go ask the developer to make this happen that the developer has to agree with you and has to enact those changes and that is not the way open-source works it's not the way free software works if I decide to start my own piece of free and open-source software I'm developing my own open-source project and people can ask for feature requests and people can you know do merge requests over on my gitlab and things like that that doesn't mean I have to accept them and matter of fact most of the time I probably wouldn't because ultimately it's my project and I'm gonna develop it the way I see fit and that's the way all these open-source projects do ultimately they're gonna do what they think is right and it's not going to be what you think is right and I think a lot of the community just cannot accept that and that's why we have all of these forks right that's why you have Vim that gets forked into Neo Vim because nobody like the way Brown Molinar the lead maintainer of Vim does Vim right everybody wanted all these features all these major changes with Vim and Brown was like no no I'm gonna keep going the same direction I've been going all you guys that want to do all this stuff with Lua and everything go fork it and create Neo Vim and that's what happened and that's kind of the point of free and open-source software is ultimately at the end of the day everybody can go do their own thing and ultimately you really shouldn't get angry at these projects if you you know file some kind of issue with them and they don't take it up or they don't even want to listen to you right or you file a bug report this is the one that really kills me people file bug reports and then the maintainer will come back and label it as do not fix like hey I'm not even gonna bother to fix that because whatever it is that you think is a bug I don't think is a bug or it's so minor it's not even worth my time trying to fix and those really tick people off those maintainers that do that but you know what don't take that personally if you know one of these projects does something like that to you just realize hey the maintainer of that project is one real a-hole and just quit fooling with that project there's so many pieces of open-source software out there you will eventually find some communities that are worth contributing to and working with and maybe you know adding code to or documentation to or just you know helping out with support requests you'll find open-source communities that make you feel welcome to make you feel like you belong you don't have to be a member of every single open-source community out there and many of them quite frankly are not worth you wasting your time on anyway so really at the end of the day don't get mad at these open-source maintainers if they don't listen to you because at the end of the day the the whole point about free software is freedom baby freedom alright guys peace