poissons d'avril

Yesterday, one of the developers on the OpenSim project introduced an April Fool's "joke" that caused all avatars to render as stick figures. This caused a reaction from many of the users of OpenSim who spent hours trying to resolve the issue. In response, Sean Dague, one of the principles in the project, posted Hey Folks, Please Get a Sense of Humor on his blog. I think he misses the point, in assuming that those complaining have no sense of humour. Worse, some of the comments go obscenely further.

In response, I posted a comment, which appears to have been rejected by the blog moderator. Therefore, I'm reposting my comment here:

Wow. Just wow. Somebody did something stupid in the product, was chastised for it publicly, and now I read whinging about how those people had no right to complain about anything you chose to do. As a developer for over 25 years, I cannot imagine the level of hubris that says of those using my product, even the most bleeding edge version of my product, “screw ‘em”.

There are legitimate reasons to work from the trunk, and anybody working from that has to expect occasionally instabilities and problems, and budget their time accordingly. Jokes are fine, but, when it turns out that a problem that makes the product more or less unusable was intentionally introduced as a joke, well, it demonstrates to me a lack of concern for those using the product.