I'm tired, y'all. It gets incredibly burdensome hearing so many people gripe about how crap #Selenium and/or #WebDriver is, particularly from people who've found something that works better for them. Is there really a need to denigrate the project you've left behind?
And here's the thing: #Selenium has been built and maintained by a volunteer team. It may surprise you to learn that the vast majority of the current incarnation of the project was written by less than a dozen people, all of whom have to juggle other responsibilities.
It's even more upsetting when the "look at how bad #Selenium is" content comes from projects that are ostensibly competitors to Selenium. It's one thing to tout the good things about your project, but is it necessary to be insulting to a small group of people to do it?
And when these projects are sponsored (in a financial sense) by for-profit companies, who dedicate paid developers to the development and maintenance of the projects, even if the companies decide to "open-source" their work, the comparison seems unfair.
If you cared that awful much about improving the state of things, where's the engagement? Where's the post to the Selenium developers' mailing list? Or the conversation on the IRC/Slack channel? Where's the good-faith discussion about deficiencies the W3C spec?
It'd be one thing if these projects' architects had come to the Selenium community and said, "We think it would be better if Selenium/WebDriver worked this way," and the community had replied, "No, we think that's wrong, and we'll not accept your contribution."
However, I know of no cases where someone from what is now a competing project has proposed radically different mechanisms for doing things that have been rejected out of hand. Not once. Ever. I'd love to be proven wrong.
Look, I get it. It's always more fun to work on the new hotness and be able to say, "I created/designed/built that." That's always going to seem cooler than saying, "I made this existing thing a whole lot better."
But there's really no need to imply that the existing thing is less worthy of effort, or is a horrid piece of technology.
This isn't like saying "Microsoft/Apple/Amazon/Google products are crap." The people who work on those projects are employees of the respective companies, and (I would hope) receive at least *some* compensation for the work they do.
I've studiously avoided naming names here, but if you're responsible for a competitor to WebDriver, especially a commercial one, and your marketing copy relies on language that implies WebDriver is substandard in some way...
Or if you're just a regular user of such projects, and you've written blog posts/articles/tweets about those other projects where your writing has included the sense that Selenium is crap...
Maybe it's time to look at the language you're using, and think about how you're insulting people who work on a project simply because it meets a need, and someone has to do it.
