Last year I wrote a short post titled The Beauty Of Open Source, where I talked about a jQuery, a Javascript project I’ve been involved with. The vast majority of developer in the jQuery community are friendly, helpful, and just good people.

And then there’s these guys. I’ve worked exclusively in PHP for the last two years, although my experience goes back farther than that. And about a year ago, I investigated several “frameworks” that had the potential to speed up my development process. I settled upon CakePHP because it was the most stable and active framework available at the time. Since then, I’ve really thrown myself into it, and it’s been a productive period.

Over the last few months the project has become more popular and active, and new people are hitting the mailing list to ask questions. And over the last few months, the “leaders” of the project have become more and more… well, dicks. Granted, I’m not talking about the whole community here, just a little subset.  A common quote is “hey this is open source, you’re not a paying customer”. When people ask questions, they’re met with responses like “read the API, dumbass” and “it’ll be ready when it’s ready”. The tone is generally, “who the fuck are you to be questioning me?”

It’s a complete contrast to the jQuery community. And since I generally don’t like jerks*, I’m really torn. I’ve invested a lot of time and energy in this, so I don’t want to jump ship. But these guys are real jerks.

*Chuck, you’re OK.