[liberationtech] Cryptocat: Translation Volunteers Needed

[Matt Mackall]

On Tue, 2013-06-11 at 18:56 -0400, Catherine Roy wrote:
> d) telling me to just 
> contribute code (as if everyone can just do that in the real world), 
> this discussion would likely have gone very differently.

You have misunderstood this offer entirely.

If Cryptocat were a proprietary project, the answer would simply be
"sorry, it's not a priority, go away". Game over, you are now powerless.

As it's an open source project, you are NOT powerless. You can make this
happen. You can do it yourself (if you have the skills), you can recruit
volunteers, or you can even organize funding for someone to work on it
(perhaps with the money you didn't pay for the tool). So it's absolutely
reasonable and empowering for Nadim to suggest this.

You should also be sensitive to the reality that open source projects
that you're not paying for have extremely finite resources (often $0
budget and only developer's free time) and have to aggressively triage
what they work on. And as a non-paying non-contributing non-customer,
you're not entitled to make ANY demands on those scarce resources at
all.

That includes expecting any developer to read or respond to private
email. My own project has tens or hundreds of thousands of users; if I
answered even a fraction of the private mail they send me, I would never
get any useful work done. Thus, I routinely delete such private email as
a matter of survival.

-- 
Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time.