Negative feedback

When writing and participating in Open Source projects, you can get quite a lot of feedback due to the open and publicly accessible nature of what you are doing and the ease with which people can find you and direct their comments to you and your community.

Out of all the feedback you will get to and about a typical project, only a small fraction will be positive. Most of the things and features you ship that just work will prosper without getting any comments, while you will hear a lot about bugs and flaws – both the real kind as well as the ones people think exist because they misunderstood something. Being an Open Source project maintainer means you should grow thick skin to endure a fair amount of criticism.

When it works, people are silent. When something fails, the crowds roar.

It is good that you get to know about the problems, then you can work on fixing them!

When you provide the feedback

As a user of Open Source, we should strive to remember to also tell developers and creators that we appreciate their hard work when things are working great and when the projects solve our problems as intended. We do not have to wait for things to fail to provide feedback.