The Flightgear community is pretty amazing. We get a whole bunch of stuff for free and if we know what we are doing can even contribute our own stuff. I have a tendency not to talk a lot on forums or Discord because I really don't often have a lot to say and there are people who are a whole lot more knowledgeable about the subjects. But I felt like I needed to say something here. So here is my opinion after being with FlightGear for several years (Only about one year on the forums but I have been familiar with the project for at least two years).
I believe that aircraft devs do not owe us anything or are forced to fix or update their planes because we tell them too.
Are there planes in FlightGear that I wish worked better? Sure, but I know that I should be thankful for the devs for at least doing the work that they did. In the past couple months, I have seen some pretty amazing progress being made on a whole bunch of planes. Sure it is slow progress, but with every new feature, it is reaffirming the reasons I decided to stick with the project.
The goal of the FlightGear project is to create a sophisticated and open flight simulator framework for use in research or academic environments, pilot training, as an industry engineering tool, for DIY-ers to pursue their favorite interesting flight simulation idea, and last but certainly not least as a fun, realistic, and challenging desktop flight simulator. We are developing a sophisticated, open simulation framework that can be expanded and improved upon by anyone interested in contributing.As previously mentioned by Thorsten, this is the mission statement of FlightGear. I want to point out the fact that is does not specify that we are done, the project is fully complete and now we are just sitting and waiting on our butts.
We are developing....
Notice the tense here. This is to point out that the FlightGear project is a work in progress. It will never be done. It will never be complete. And when most of the community thinks that it is complete, someone will point out that the features we were working on are outdated and totally flawed, so we will begin the process again. That is the way it is with Open Source projects and you have to learn to deal with it.
Some community members may argue with each other but for the most part we are all mature here, we can handle that. It's pretty impressive the amount of professional communication that goes on every single day. I think that many people in the FG community, maybe even without realizing it, have adopted the core idea of a Wikipedia principal, "Assume good faith" People in the FG community are not out to get you or out to cause you harm, they just want to understand and do what they can to assist you if you have a problem they can reasonably help with. Every single person I have interacted with in this community has been totally positive and very reasonable about his or her requests from me.
As for what I do for the FlightGear project, not a lot. And I will admit that because I know it is true. I would love to dive deep into the source code and make some major contribution, but I am still pretty far off from that. I do what I can though. I am interested in ATC so I will every once in a while do an ATC session and even if I get one or two pilots I call it a success. If someone in the community sees a void of documentation about a certain subject, I try and make a video that explains how it works. I suck at making videos but I still try because I know it will help the community as a whole.
I am a student, I basically don't have any free time during the school year so it takes quite a bit of time before I am able to react to a need that I could help with. I don't try to help the community or be ATC because I have to,
I do it because it is fun and I enjoy it. I work on projects like this and it helps me to keep a grip on the idea that I can't do everything and I have to rely on other people to help me get to a point I am satisfied with and that take time. Could I make better videos and be a better ATC? Definitely! But it's an adventure that takes time, lots of time, that I don't always have.
As has been reiterated on this post many times,
if you want to see change, be the change. And even if you don't want to be the change, you should
at least ask the person politely.
Thanks for the opportunity to let me speak and get out of my comfort zone for a bit, I am going back into my introvert self now.