@zcspencer… and @yvesracine
It’s really distressing to find that you were not able to arrive at a resolution and instead decided to publicly air this as “dirty laundry”.
How much did your contribution cost?
From the exchange above, it looks like @yvesracine spent considerable time and effort to try to assist you… Far more than is worth the small amount of revenue.
Demanding that Yves “open source” his code (which he has complete right to keep proprietary!) is obviously what shut down the conversation and opportunity to come to a mutually beneficial conclusion.
But perhaps Yves could have worded a more patient and generous response to your indication that you found a code change to resolve the problem.
Providing Tech Support is very challenging. Sometimes the issue is trivial, but the user’s skill level is such that an expensive amount of hand holding is needed and difficult to justify.
In other cases, the user is indeed more skilled than the Support person, but still needs assistance (this happened to me on the phone with Amazon & SmartThings for an Alexa problem a few days ago. I actually found the problem and solution completely without their help while waiting for them to troubleshoot, and explained exactly where their system failed. I was not sent a free product, refund, or their source code, but just thanked for my observations).
Amazon is a huge company that has the resources for the level of patience and training required for that “quality” of support… Though I’m convinced that they never would have found my problem without hours of effort on both our ends.
Yves is a one-person operation. He certainly doesn’t need me to critique his quality of service or recommend tuning his approach.
But, personally, I think you could offer a little empathy and cut him some slack rather than post publicly antagonistic your private support exchange. He’s made quite a lot of significant contributions to the SmartThings Community (free and otherwise).
Just sharing my stream of thought. I provide User Support for SmartTiles (currently free) and sometimes the lack of appreciation is incredible… Though from most users, their genuine appreciation is wonderful and energizing.