Demanding Features: Corporate vs. Open Source
Description
This is a two-panel meme from the movie 'Despicable Me.' The top panel features the character Agnes looking up with a sweet, pleading expression, captioned 'How people ask companies for new feautures or bug fixes.' The bottom panel shows the character Gru with a menacing look, pointing a gun at the viewer, captioned 'How people ask Open Source Devs for features or bug fixes.' The meme humorously contrasts the polite and patient way users typically request support for paid software with the often demanding, entitled, and aggressive tone they take with open-source developers, who are usually unpaid volunteers. It's a sharp commentary on the thankless nature of much open-source work and the lack of respect for the maintainers who provide immense value to the industry for free
Comments
12Comment deleted
The fastest way to get your feature request in an open-source project ignored is to open an issue with the title 'URGENT!!!' and a body of 'This is a critical feature for my multi-million dollar company.'
Amazing how the same CTO who politely labels a vendor ticket “P3 - fix when convenient” will open a 3 AM GitHub issue titled “🚨 URGENT: your free weekend project just bricked our production cluster - need patch before stand-up.”
The real bug here is expecting the same SLA from someone maintaining a critical dependency in their spare time for free as you'd get from a company charging $50k/year for enterprise support - yet somehow the open source maintainer's response time is still faster
The irony is that the same user who files a polite, well-documented ticket with their enterprise vendor - complete with reproduction steps, environment details, and business impact analysis - will open a GitHub issue at 2 AM demanding 'FIX THIS NOW!!!' with zero context, then complain about response time from a maintainer who's been doing this for free since 2015. Bonus points if they threaten to 'switch to a better library' that they also won't contribute to
Amazing how a paid ticket gets “whenever you can,” but a GitHub issue gets “URGENT, blocks prod” with no version, no repro, and an implied enterprise SLA on a volunteer’s Saturday
Companies get manners because they charge; OSS gets the barrel because it's 'free'
Vendors get polite tickets; OSS maintainers get: “Prod is down - what’s your weekend SLA for the free lib we pinned to 0.9.3, with no repro steps?”
True Story Comment deleted
The opposite I suppose? 😂 Comment deleted
Unfortunately, your meme doesn't include a joke. Comment deleted
It's sarcasm Comment deleted
True 😭 Comment deleted