XML FeedsI recently changed jobs and coming from eBay where the preferred communication method is Skype (natch!), I'm now at a company that prefers Jabber. That's all fine and well and being a Mac guy, Adium is the most well-known and arguably richest-featured client. IRC is also used heavily and coincidentally right when I joined up, the present beta of Adium included new IRC support. I'm of the opinion that one good solution usually is a better option than 2 separate great ones used at the same time, so I gave the new Adium a go.
It worked for the most part. It did the usual things that Adium is prone to do like hang while connecting to a Jabber server that's heavily populated with users. IRC worked as well but isn't very full featured and that's fine being a first release. The major problem I had with it though was that when joined to several large IRC channels (2-3 channels with more than 200 users, but also a few smaller ones under 50 users), a message on a channel would lock Adium for 1-3 seconds every time. It's a decidedly annoying and inconvenient issue.
Not having a huge amount of time to look into the issue further or even properly report it on their bug tracker (like a good user should), I just decided to fire off a quick tweet about it and vent a little. At the time, I thought it was a polite way of bringing to their attention that the IRC plug-in had performance issues. I was instead greeted with this reply.
I'm a big boy and I can handle some harshness directed towards me. I also understand that the Adium account is shared by several developers and that the opinion shared by one of them isn't necessarily the opinion of all of them. But this should be a lesson to any entity sharing a single account: be careful whom you give the keys to. One rotten apple can spoil the whole bunch.
To be clear, I don't hold the opinion that the developers of any free software project "owe" me anything. I appreciate their efforts in bettering the software community as a whole. But I think those that release buggy or poor performing software should be prepared for some negative statements directed towards their "artwork". Bug reports are feedback, no matter how terse or uncaring they might seem. A good developer will take that feedback and want to understand what is happening and why. A poor developer will simply shrug it off with a response like the one I was given. Again, this was just one of Adium's developers writing this, not the whole team and I have no doubt there are a number of great developers working on Adium.
@Adium did respond the following day with an apology and wanted to know more about the actual problem. Perhaps if I have some time, I'll do a process profile as their troubleshoot suggests and send that off to them so they can better the software. This is how free software works and both users and developers have to do their part.
As an aside, I retweeted their response for my own amusement. A number of my friends responded, some with tagging @Adium in their replies. Eventually, the actual user (@Robbyison) behind the comment replied to one of my friends. Here is a screenshot of his replies. Apparently, his mindset is that if it's free, everything is acceptable and users shouldn't complain. That's the wrong mindset to have but is probably fairly common among OSS developers.
My takeaway from this is that maybe a separate Jabber client and IRC client aren't so bad after all.
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3 comments
I think the most depressing thing about all of this is that @Robbyison has in his profile that he's a future teacher. We have enough education issues without those attitudes being taught to our kids. 
While his specific response to you was indeed unacceptable, his response to your friend does have merit. You did not provide anything that could in any way be construed as helpful. All you said was, in essence, "your program sucks". His best response should have been "What's wrong with it?", and his worst should have been to ignore your tweet.This has nothing to do with the software being free. Rather it has to do with your lack of information and his bad attitude.
Full disclosure: I used to work for a software company providing customer/ technical support. If I ever responded to a user with "Fuck you" for ANY reason, I'd have been fired on the spot.
I love how you call your whine a "bug report".If you have a look at the history of @Adium tweets - mostly by me in the recent months, by the way - you will find we have been more than willing to help people. And we have received a bunch of "negative statements".
Telling somebody his work is "unacceptable" is not polite by any means, it's disrespectful and not constructive. Saying "it does not work well for me" would have been "terse" but polite.
On another day, I might have reacted differently and left out the profanity but in the end it is still a case of "what goes around, comes around":
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