This post prompted by Aaron Klotz’s Diffusion of Responsibility and Sumana Harihareswara’s Inessential Weirdnesses in Open Source.

One of the most common ways to start interacting with a free software project, as opposed to just using the software produced by that project, is when you trip over a bug or a missing feature and now you need to go tell the developers about it. Unfortunately, that process is often incredibly off-putting. If there’s a bug tracking system, it is probably optimized for people who spend all day every day working with it, and may appear to demand all kinds of information you have no idea how to supply. If there isn’t, you’re probably looking at signing up for some sort of mailing list (mailing list! how retro!) Either way, it may not be easy to find, and there’s a nonzero chance that some neckbeard with a bad attitude is going to yell at you. It shouldn’t be so, but it is.

So, I make this offer to you, the general public, as I have been doing for close friends for many years: if you don’t want to deal with that shit, I will file bugs for you. I’ve been on the Internet since not quite the elder days, and I’ve been hacking free software almost as long; I know how to find these people and I know how to talk to them. We’ll have a conversation and we’ll figure out exactly what’s wrong and then I’ll take it from there. I’m best at compilers and Web browsers, but I’ll give anything a shot.

THE FINE PRINT: If you want to take me up on this, please do so only via email; my address is on the Contact page. Please allow up to one week for an initial response, as this service is provided in my copious free time.

Offer valid only for free software (also known as open source) (as opposed to software that you are not allowed to modify or redistribute, e.g. Microsoft Word). Offer also only valid for problems which I can personally reproduce; it’s not going to go well for anyone involved if I have to play telephone with you and the developers. Offer specifically not valid for operating system kernels or device drivers of any kind, both because those people are even less pleasant to work with than the usual run of neckbeards, and because that class of bugs tends to be hardware-dependent and therefore difficult for me to personally reproduce on account of I don’t have the exact same computer as you.

The management cannot guarantee this service will cause bugs to actually get fixed in any kind of timely fashion, or, in fact, ever.