However, I do wonder if there's more that happy users could do to support OS developers and projects. Besides the obvious donation, I think it would be kind of disruptive to create a ticket to thank the author(s) for their time and work. Tickets are there, after all, to report issues or request improvements of some sort, not for cheer-leading. And often times the emails used in git commits either don't exist or aren't active.
IMO, it is important to find a way to provide positive feedback since the systems we have setup are there for constructive or negative feedback. The later has already driven good developers away from the community and only when they left did the community realise how far the bad elements had gone. Suddenly there were outpours of positive feedback with blog posts, forum posts, comments, tickets, etc. but by then, it's too late.
How can we drown out rude, self-entitled and demanding elements of our community that post things "if you don't implement this, you obviously don't care about your product" with nice things?
For smaller projects: I can’t speak for other people, obviously, but I’d happily accept the occasional GitHub issue saying “I used your project and it helped me do $thing, thanks!”
Days when I wake up to an email notification saying that somebody found my project useful are the best. And that’s true whether it was a direct email or a GitHub issue notification.
As an open source lurker/consumer I sometimes take a dive in to a projects' bug tracker if something glitches at a reproducible level and some of the tickets I've seen have been appalling.
The sense of entitlement in those has left me slack jawed on more than one occasion.
I've pondered on this a few times when debating whether or not to open source some of the stuff I work on from time to time and the conclusion has been a massive 'Nope'.
Not because I don't want to share for the good of humanity but because of this exact issue.
Criticism I can take (). The open tickets that either DEMAND that something be changed, those that have hit a valid bug (but failed to check the repo for open issues before raising a ticket) and then say that it is costing them $$$$ in downtime and (again) DEMANDING that it be fixed make me weep for the maintainers.
As to what the solution is – I’ve heard (via the grapevine & IRC chats) that receiving an email saying ‘Hi, thanks for making this.’ with a subject line like ‘Thanks dude’ makes a world of difference when having a bad day™.
Yet this is not enough to properly thank those that do Open Source.
Somehow I think that browsing an open source repo and searching for the ‘Help Wanted’ tags is something that all should do if they use an open source program regularly. Not all of it is CODING stuff. Sometimes it is a translation request (no coding skills needed), A request for ‘Does anyone else see this happening? If not will mark as ‘Closed’ etc. Also most will have a metric that maintainers can monitor about how many viewed which pages. Seeing a ‘help wanted’ bug be unviewed for months on end while being confronted with ‘WHY UR PROJECT NOT DO THIS?’ level of tickets is ….. depressing.
Hopefully others here on HN can chip in with what would make them feel valued and appreciated.