Nope. We'd been working on our response ever since Dear GitHub was published. It just took a little time because we wanted to think long and hard about our response - beyond just the words we used to respond – and actually consider how we are interacting with the community, and where we can make demonstrable improvements. It is just coincidence that the ESLint thread happened this week, and our response came out today.
I disagree: I'd rather see a well reasoned response than a knee jerk relation. If they had decided _not_ to do anything, I'd prefer to have them think about it first.
That said, they set the bar pretty high, and now they need to execute.
They didn't deliver a feature, they put out the lame equivalent of a press release. It's like somebody called you on the phone, said "hello? Can you hear me?" and you waited 29 hours to reply "hello".
That's no way to run a modern web-based business for alpha geeks.
This world. Seriously their response was some words, that doesn't take that long to come up with. 29 days to go to production on that is not good. Adding a simple feature on a project which I am pretty sure they say they deploy daily on shouldn't take 29 days when you have the amount of talent they have. I am sure people aren't expecting the world, but 29 days should equal some text saying ok we're listening here is something we've done.
They’re already working on a lot of different things; they’re not just there waiting for someone to write a letter and then jump on coding everything that’s written in.
I didn’t say they have more important things to do but that they can’t just stop what they’re doing and code a solution in 3 weeks as the parent comment was suggesting. It’s perfectly ok to have to wait more than 29 days to (hopefully) see new features released that address the letter.
They don't have to just stop what they're doing, they stop what a couple of people are doing and ship something. 29 days would be fine if they replied straight away. But they didn't they took ages, 29 days is a long time for a response. So if you take a long time to reply you have to have something to show why. As it stands, this just looks like they couldn't really be bothered and had it as a "do at some point" task.
Did they who filed the letter ask? If they asked and didn't get a reply to the effect of "we're working on it", then I can see your point. If they didn't ask, well then that's on them. I not finding any stories about them asking about what's going on and not receiving a reply, so I'll assume the latter, since I'm sure the former would have been posted about.
However, many of us are frustrated. Those of us who run some of the most popular projects on GitHub feel completely ignored by you. We’ve gone through the only support channel that you have given us either to receive an empty response or even no response at all. We have no visibility into what has happened with our requests, or whether GitHub is working on them.
It's a statement that said that they asked them to address some critical issues via their regular support channel. The statement said they have already reached out, and they had nowhere else to go so hence the open letter.
Or in other words, to answer the question I was asked (which was "Did they who filed the letter ask?"), yes, they did ask. Apparently repeatedly.