“It's open source! We’ll let our customers fix it.” (opens in new tab)

Each time this is true is an opportunity for a competitor to fill a gap.

Comparing Apache Beam with Stripe's API is unfair in my opinion. Apache Beam can be operated outside Google Cloud, but the Stripe API is only useful for Stripe customers (as mentioned by the author). I don't think it's weird that a company provides more support to paying customers. The author should have raised the issue with Google Cloud's support team, instead of creating a Jira ticket for Apache Beam.

What fraction of customers is affected by the issue?

That's always the first question I ask myself when I get a bug report. I can't fix every bug / annoyance. My software is already way more complex than I can handle, so I have to prioritize which bugs I fix. If the bug only occurs in a special setting and only happens for one customer that isn't important, then I probably won't fix it. I'll just say, sorry that my product doesn't work for you.

Now that customer will be annoyed, because my product was a good fit except for this one issue.

But if the product was open source, then they can fix the blocking issue themselves! I see this as a win/win situation.

I agree with this to a point.

I don't think this really has to do with open source vs. closed source. But let's look at what would happen if you were paying for a product, and were given a binary blob in order to interact with it. You find a bug. You report the bug to the company. They triage it, and decide it's an edge case, fixing it isn't a high priority for them, and they toss is somewhere in the backlog and expect to get to it in 6 or 12 months or whatever.

As a customer, you're stuck. Either you figure out a workaround on your end, live with the bug, or find a new product to use. The last option might be difficult, since switching costs are often not small.

If the client was open source, you could end up with the same reaction from the company, but in this case you have the ability to try to fix the problem yourself. Should you have to, in an ideal world? No, of course not. But we often don't live in an ideal world.

I agree that a company shouldn't have the attitude that open sourcing their client absolves them of all responsibility for it. I mean, sure, if they want to do that, that's fine. I would certainly guess that would make their product less attractive to many potential customers, but if they're ok with that, that's fine. It's up to the company to decide where to spend their finite resources, and a model where they let their users fix their bugs might actually work out best for them, even if it doesn't for everybody.

I don't know how we affect major change on this sort of issue, besides a vote with the wallet. I tend to encounter it most in areas which are already underserved - therefore you can choose not to pay but you're likely punishing yourself with a worse competing product.

The temptation will always be present for (some) organizations to use Open Source as a crutch to underfund development and support. I think it is a phenomenal way to grow your product in ways that you initially didn't expect from your customer base, but it cannot be the way in which your main support is bolstered.

Reminds me a lot of Rich Hickey's "Open Source is not about you" gist:

https://gist.github.com/richhickey/1563cddea1002958f96e7ba95...

The first few paragraphs really stuck with me in how I think about the OSS that I use.

The tone is blunt, but the content is spot-on.

For more context around what specifically is going there: https://www.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/a0pjq9/rich_hickey...

I enjoyed this article, and I’m sorry for focusing on such a small thing, but can anyone explain the need to signal having attended Recurse Centre at the end?

> Thank you to everyone who provided valuable feedback on earlier drafts of this post, many of whom are Recursers.

I’ve noticed a few instances of people really drawing attention to having attended, and it always seems a bit awkward to me. Like, if I attended Cambridge and put “thanks to those who reviewed this most, many of whom are fellow Cambridge grads”, it would certainly come across as fairly pompous. I really don’t mean to put down the author, I just don’t understand the motivation for this kind of thing if not to boast, or signal some kind of social status.

Are alumni encouraged to advertise RC wherever possible? Or is it really that life-changing that everyone who’s been wants to share it with the world?

Contrast the work I'm doing this week with Microsoft's Graph API.

The C# library Microsoft provides for this is on GitHub, and their library docs it turns out are auto-generated ... But they aren't automatically tested! So it's possible for the docs to simply not work, and since they're auto-generated they're automatically kept not working. So GitHub issues about non-working docs get closed because even the maintainers can't make small doc fixes. Brilliant /s

I wanted to call this "Continuous Disintegration" but somebody already coined that phrase.

"But if this issue goes unresolved for a long period of time, my employer might pay me to fix the issue myself and contribute the change upstream. That doesn’t sit well with me. We pay Google a lot of money to use their products, and having to fix bugs in those products ourselves isn’t what we signed up for."

I hear this, but I'm not sure that this is a case of Google expecting customers to fix bugs themselves or "outsourcing" to volunteers. I can think of a lot of instances where people would be thrilled if they even had the ability to fix a persistent issue with software that the company won't fix itself.

If you pay a lot of money to Google and expect customer service, it seems to me that you should be filing a bug with Google around BigQuery if you expect Googlers to fix it vs. the Apache Project. (If Google has committers in that upstream then they can be assigned the work if it's important enough.)

I guess what I'm saying is that filing a bug with the upstream feels like an indirect route if you expect customer service. I'd be filing the bug or discussing the flaw with my account rep / salesperson as close to the vendor as possible.

> But if this issue goes unresolved for a long period of time, my employer might pay me to fix the issue myself and contribute the change upstream. That doesn’t sit well with me. We pay Google a lot of money to use their products, and having to fix bugs in those products ourselves isn’t what we signed up for.

If they ignored the issue, it's likely they'll ignore the pull request to fix it as well.

A lot of companies seem to end up maintaining forks of various projects with fixes.

If an open-source software doesn't meet your needs, no big deal, you're free to use or create an alternative.

If a big company's open-source software doesn't meet your needs, no big deal, you're free to use or create an alternative to that big company.

If a government, ISP, or otherwise no-alternative's organization's open-source software doesn't meet your needs - then it's a big deal. But I'm not sure the examples in this article are of that case. Surely there are alternatives to Apache Beam and BigQuery.

> But if this issue goes unresolved for a long period of time, my employer might pay me to fix the issue myself and contribute the change upstream

And why do you care? That's the employer's money and their waste. You're getting paid to code what your employer wants, why do you care if they want you to code for Google? You have the option to quit, and your employer has the option to switch to another service.

I want to see more examples besides these two. My suspicion: open source is a red herring here, and all we're seeing is Google's longstanding culture of being terrible at support.

This blog post is basically comparing two companies in different parts of the "standard" company life cycle: first make them love you, then make them use you, then ignore them[1]. Support in large companies is a high-leverage activity. To receive support you need leverage in terms of dollars spent per month.

[1] In the past I've characterized this from the customer's perspective as https://merveilles.town/@akkartik/106742502781631361

This is very well reasoned and I mostly agree, but the reality is that if it was closed source it would be the same except you just couldn’t fix it yourself reasonably and legally. Google may be falling on its maintenance, but stuff like this crops up in proprietary software constantly. Presumably their calculus for putting resources on fixing your bug is just tilted against you. I think the cost of fixing this bug should be something that you consider part of the cost of using the service; no less than the cost spent maintaining or operating your own services should count when comparing the cost of self-hosting FLOSS stacks.

Tl;dr: I think open source is still just a straight improvement here. I think it’s fine as long as the cost of fixing it is considered the cost of using the stack for decision making purposes.

This is a very sheltered experience. There have been countless times where I had to pull out the disassembler because the 3rd party company support has been incompetent and ineffective. At least with open source, I'm a lot faster at fixing a blocking issue than when I literally need to cook up a binary patch for it.

If you're paying Google for their product, and you have support, the solution is to speak to their support team, and mention this. Failing that, you should contact your TAM. Even if Google's engineers looked at the bug, for all they know you're some random person who hasn't paid for support or whatever else.

I've reported multiple bugs with different vendors, and any time it doesn't get triaged within a week, I contact their support and mention it. It usually gets triaged pretty quick. This entirely depends on the vendor but more often than not it works.

> In general, open source maintainers owe you nothing.

My open source users donate money to me. So I feel like I owe them a lot and would never want to give them anything short of the best software in the world. It's amazing how a few bucks a month can totally change how you feel. Next time you use a piece of FOSS and find it cool and useful, consider tipping the person who made it possible!

Part of the problem is, if you open-source something, you will become overwhelmed with pull requests and critiques of every code change you make. People will expect you to do things in a transparent and community-driven way. They'll yell at you if you develop updates inside your company offices and then "throe it over the wall" to the open-source side.

open source still means we can fix their shit. when say, a gadget has closed source, we are stuck with it. the firmware is usually shit anyway.

I don't know if this would make the author more or less happy, but in my experience this isn't just an open source thing. I read the author's bug report, and just off the top of my head, I can think of multiple similar bugs that have been sitting around in my company's Jira for longer. The data analytics space doesn't have a zero-bug culture, so "weird error when using this specific intersection of features" tends to be seen as more of a feature request.

The author would have a point in case of a bug, but this is actually a feature request. Open source or not, customers are not entitled to demand new features.

> But last month, I filed a Beam bug report for an issue in Beam’s BigQuery integration (which, as far as I can tell, is officially maintained by Google). The gist of it is that when you’re using the native Python Beam implementation, you can’t upload data to BigQuery in large batches — you can only stream it, which is significantly slower than batch uploading. While it’s still mostly usable (streaming the data into BigQuery instead of uploading it in one big batch works well enough), the issue makes uploading some large datasets prohibitively slow.

I guess that’s cool.

The issue here seems to be that Google doesn’t allocate enough resources for that particular integration.

Meaning you shouldn’t use a Google technology if you don’t have hard proof that it's prioritized by Google on just the same level as it is by you. Which is not unlike the usual “Google tech tax”.

The funny corollary is that Google gets to hold a lot of hot potatoes. They wanted a browser monopoly, now they have to support the most widely used browser core. Everyone else may contribute. Or not.

I think it is a great strategy to push maintenance costs on customers as long as they swallow them :) Now seriously it is fine, it makes some room for competition to jump in. Sure as a customer I would like to have a great support for little cost. So I will look for such solutions on the market. I could also whine, but it is not too productive.

I'm not sure that's just open source products. Par for course with the largest online services too... looking at you Google, Facebook, and Amazon.

At least with an open source product if I want to pay I can have an issue addressed ultimately. Good luck with that deleted YouTube account or owned Facebook business page.

Thinking on it I'm sure if you're paying enough IBM will be happy to throw developers at any problem you can come up with.