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0 pointsXylakant8y ago0 comments

Sorry if the following sounds like a personal rant: it is.

You're saying that people care deeply about your product. In reverse, I don't get a feeling you care much about the community around your products. Since you're working at developer relations, I'd like to point out that you're still funneling people to your IRC channels via https://www.elastic.co/community, but once people arrive there, they barely get any help from elastic people. Despite multiple requests, the channels are still not logged or searchable, so questions get asked over and over again. I'm a long-time lurker there and especially questions about how to contribute to the projects end up in silence. People asking how to work on tickets (in the tickets) as part of a university course or as part of a Gsoc assignment: silence.

There's barely anyone offering guidance on how to contribute to the open source project beyond "you'll need to sign the CLA." The CLA is contributor-hostile. Anything people touch as part of their work cannot be contributed unless they get legal involved - a show stopper for many. The CLA, at least in some versions required full copyright assignment and indemnification - I, personally, can say that it stopped me from providing any kind of fixes or improvements.

I used to run the Berlin elasticsearch usergroup which started out before elastic, the company, even existed. At some point it used to be one of the largest ES UGs world-wide, still, any kind of support from elastic beyond personal support from some developers: nonexistant. Heads up and infos for feature announcements so that we could prep a talk fitting the announcement: Not there. Sending a speaker for an announcement? Impossible. At some point, elastic even tried to charge us for the privilege of running a UG. The best offer we received was an offer to pay for pizza. We did get a honorable mention at the first elasticon, IIRC.

> Yes, we are asking for a fair bit of trust...and I hope we continue to prove ourselves worthy of that trust.

Good luck. I've heard these words before. Any kind of interaction with elastic, the company, that I had as a community member was borderline hostile. I wish things would improve, but I've pretty much lost faith.

0 comments

kawsper8y ago

I have lost faith as well, but in my case it might just be that Elastic are working on too many integrations, or that Rails is just not a priority for them, but the official elasticsearch-rails gem is set to support ES6.0 by Q2 or Q3 in 2018[0], remember that Elasticsearch 6.0 was released November, 2017.

[0] https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch-rails/issues/756

rdsubhas8y ago

On the other hand,

Their discourse community is very active. ElasticSearch people help out there a lot. They are people in the end, and they can't be everywhere. They are spread thin and they do their best. Open source doesn't mean super human. Lack of resources doesn't mean "hostile". If you think not being able to respond is hostile, then wait till you really see the hostile part of the world.

For everything ElasticSearch does, this is a very critical and negative outlook.

XylakantOP8y ago

> They are people in the end, and they can't be everywhere.

I agree, but they mention IRC as an official contact and support channel. Either do that and then support it, or don't. But you can't say "you can get help on IRC" and then not be there, that just does not work. People do actually come to the channel and expect answers and they do treat volunteers there like they're paid support staff - an expectation that is understandable given that it's listed on the official page.

> Lack of resources doesn't mean "hostile".

No, but I didn't say so. I said the interactions were borderline hostile. I won't recount the episodes here, though, but generally they were about asking us to go out of our way to organize things and then drop the ball. If you ask me to do stuff for you for free, then you'd better follow through. Lack of resources is no longer an excuse then.

mayya8y ago

yes, indeed. Discourse would be a good place to ask questions. We can't answer all questions, especially long "did I design my domain indexes correctly", but we strive to help and answer questions about Elastic.

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