Im afraid if somebody does something for you for free you have no right to criticise quality/timing etc, on a moral sense AND on a legal sense, no moral or legal contract exists, since you are doing nothing for Sam you have no rights over him. For a contract to be formed there must be an exchange of goods or services. Its like shouting at your granny for buying you the wrong birthday present.
Here’s the thing. OSMC so far seems like a great project. I am happily running Alpha 4 - 3 times over. I am also looking forward to the RC or beta or whatever it is that’s coming out. I think a lot of the threads are just people trying to ask for an update, and they are mostly trying to have humility about it. The situation is hairy. On one hand you have developers (who are inherently sensitive people) and you have users (that are inherently impatient people). The users are trying to get an update, but stay humble enough to not insult the devs by making sure to compliment along with their posts that try to glean a bit of update. The devs are trying to keep the users in check while they get a stable (important) release out, without engaging in debates about dates and times, so they just lock threads.
From a third person perspective, I would suggest that maybe a daily status update would suit everyone. If Sam made a thread each day with a brief update (10 minutes maybe), and some indication off progress, people would lay off. Maybe not daily, just periodically, maybe once every other day, or twice each day. I get that this takes time away from the work, but it has to be less time then engaging all these threads. And locking threads does end the conversation and send the message to users to hold their horses, but it also insults people. People who want to ask about the release, but won’t out of respect or fear of insulting a dev, read other people’s threads in hopes of some type of update, and wind up just as insulted as the author.
Before you flame me, understand that I am not in either camp. I am content. My OSMCs are doing what I want, and while I am excited for the release, I am not in dire straights in my current situation. I am just offering my opinion from my third person perspective.
OK, I’ve let this shit fester long enough in here. Once people start issuing trollish death threats, we’ve derailed significantly from the topic at hand.
This is what’s going to happen:
Thread locked. You’ve had enough time to discuss this issue, there’s nothing new that can be added
Anyone fueling the fire (like some of the trolls we have seen in the past 24 hours) is gently reminded that a ban from this forum also results in a ban from the Download and update server. After all, you wouldn’t want to use OSMC if it’s that bad.
