Keeping our developer community open and respectful

Announcements
1

Hi everyone,

At Atlassian, one of our core values is “Open company, no bullshit.” That means we actively invite discussion, debate, and critique. We want our developer community to challenge proposals, ask hard questions, and surface concerns. It’s how we grow and get better, together.

But open doesn’t mean unkind, or bending situations to fit an argument. We all have an obligation to be careful with our words and prevent sharing false information.

Unfortunately we have observed repeated behavior that crosses the line from constructive to deliberately confrontational, personal and discouraging. These moments don’t just go against Atlassian’s Acceptable Use Policy, they risk pushing great people away from engaging in the conversation entirely. When the conversation shifts to naming individuals, this crosses the line into bullying, and Atlassian will not tolerate this behavior in our ecosystem.

In addition, many of us are here as representatives of our companies and need to remember the Marketplace agreement expects we conduct ourselves in a professional manner, not disparage or devalue Atlassian, or the Marketplace. This applies to forums outside of this one.

Here are a few links to refresh yourself with our policies:

Failure to comply with these policies will result in Atlassian enacting the rights stated in these polices.

So here’s a reminder and a recommitment. This community only thrives when every voice feels welcome and respected. You can (and should!) disagree with an RFC or a product decision. But do it with curiosity and generosity. Respond like a human is on the other end, because someone who loves the ecosystem, our partners and our customers is engaging on the other side.

We’re incredibly grateful to all of you who continue to raise the bar with thoughtful comments, respectful feedback, and deep engagement to help shape the future of the Atlassian platform. Let’s continue to build a space that reflects the best of our values.

Thanks for being here,

Chris and the Atlassian Ecosystem Team

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2

@ChrisHemphill1 some people who reply are not native English speakers. People should not misinterpret their directness as aggression or as acting without empathy to the person from Atlassian who is acting as Atlassian’s public representative in these RFCs or messages.

Remember also that Atlassian partners have historic domain knowledge that new members of Atlassian staff may be deeply lacking in.

What may be completely reasonable to a these Atlassian staffers may seem absolutely ridiculous to a veteran Marketplace vendor with expert domain knowledge.

Expressions of anger from such people at the message being publicly sent by an individual Atlassian are frustration at the Atlassian entity not the current person representing the entity. Please remember that.

Please do not make trouble with marketplace vendors who only want the best mutually for both themselves and Atlassian.

To all concerned, to be absolutely clear, this message is targeted at the Atlassian entity rather than any one person.

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This is a really unfortunate timing for this message. I’ll bite, since I usually remain silent. I have never seen anyone be agressive with Atlassian but Atlassian seems to repeat feeling the “bullying” (to quote).

  • For 10 years in the ecosystem I’ve been trying to be as silent as possible. Because Atlassian is sometimes threatening.
  • There aren’t enough customers on the Atlassian Cloud for us to make a living. Customers on the Cloud are smaller, less satisfied (with 6x more staff on my part),
  • Atlassian is killing DC, competing with plugins on Cloud, and implementing APIs that don’t allow us to make a nice product on Cloud,
  • Atlassian asked us to rewrite our product in:
    • In 2020 for Connect (with “heavy incentives” if we were not on the Cloud),
    • In 2025 for Forge,
    • In 2025 (April) for Runs-on-Atlassian / Forge SQL,
    • Each time with an incompatible platform where most of the code can be thrown away.
  • We seem to have no way of influencing Atlassian’s decisions,
  • We ask insight on what constraints push to disruptive and heavily-penalizing decisions. We’re here to understand, empathize, commit and advance. We’re only faced by Atlassian’s language elements. We seem to have no impact on decisions.
  • We see what seem mistakes after mistakes, we’re totally ready to not consider them mistakes if we can understand the path and constraints that you have, but we can’t notice that you have studied the less-disruptive options.
  • We don’t know your threshold for “disparagement”. Is citing the Atlassian’s stock price, or citing to our customers Atlassian’s fresh new policy of blocking our releases for their urgent bugfix, considered as disparagement? Can a public fact, currently affecting customers’ quality of service, put on your responsibility, be disparagement? Can a negative answer on RFC (which I don’t respond to, for this reason) be disparagement? What is your threshold and how does it allows us to describe your proposals/implementations?

I’m really in for empathy with your team. I have friends at Atlassian. I have stock. I’m rooting for you guys. But everyone young around me is writing their notes in Notion.

Unfortunately, the stock market seems to confirm that Atlassian is making bad decisions.

What about Atlassian becomes awesome again? What if you write a Forge II platform that allows us to write in SpringBoot in Runs-on-Atlassian? What if you empathized with our problems?

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@ChrisHemphill1 could Atlassian please elaborate which policies apply to Atlassian staff with regard to Marketplace Partner interactions?

This feels very one-directional.

Building a community requires the same commitment from both parties, especially in a situation in which there is such a huge power disparity. We all know the saying “with great power…”, but we are yet to see Atlassian acting responsible when it comes to partner management (as also outlined by other replies).

There are plenty examples of RFC questions unanswered, threads ghosted, genuine cries for help from the community that go ignored.

If Atlassian truly feels that there has been an increase of confrontational interaction, may I ask what Atlassian has done in terms of introspection to asses where this is coming from?

May I also suggest to Atlassian that she might want to consider that it takes courage for people to speak out against her considering the immense power disparity? Atlassian staff will not suffer from mistakes or subpar implementation, or outright sherlocking, but Atlassian Marketplace Partners can risk their livelihood on Atlassian’ whim.

“Open Company, no Bullshit” also means that Atlassian takes responsibility for her part in a community that is becoming more and more desperate.

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5

Appreciate the comments so far @remie , @aragot and @david - we hear you. Your longevity and dedication to this ecosystem is valued. It was also time to remind everyone of the ground rules for communication and engagement and this goes for Atlassian’s as well.

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Hi @ChrisHemphill1 – To be clear, many people in this forum would welcome a meaningful response to the frustrations expressed above. Whether from you or another Atlassian.

“We hear you” is a great start. But no one is going to feel heard until a representative of your company acknowledges this community’s frustrations with empathy and understanding.

(Recognizing that a meaningful response will take time to formulate. :slightly_smiling_face:)

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Thanks @ChrisHemphill1 for the measured response and working to keep this vital communication channel a constructive experience for Atlassian and Partners.

I served 20+ years in the corporate software dev world and understand that with a large org moving quickly some decisions will go sideways. Smart/well-intentioned people make choices with limited information, are solving for different problems and may not see the whole picture.

Some items this year that feel punitive/negative from a partner side:

  • Blocking releases to customers due to a vendor requalification review with no advance notice or alternate path. It was an odd choice when there is already an existing process for annual app architecture review.
  • Announcement to cut 10% revenue from all connect app vendors. I’m guessing it was a tactic to force app rebuilds on forge. But wow, this is forcing us to internally debate between removing existing customer features to fit within forge or keeping customers happy and reducing payroll.
  • Runs on Atlassian…

I think it would help the partner sentiment that when there is an Atlassian misstep, especially one that impacts our shared customers, someone steps up with “oops, that likely wasn’t the best way to tackle this. Here is some more information on why we had to do it this way, or here is how we will adjust”.

Thanks for listening,
Chris Cairns
Digital Rose

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Some random points I notice on communication style and effectiveness:

  • the “no bullshit” core value stems from Atlassian’s Australian roots.
  • like us Aussies, entrepreneurs/founders tend to get straight to the point with no filter.
  • however Atlassian’s internal culture doesn’t appear to embody this and instead fears it.
  • public Atlassian staff statements are often carefully worded corporate fluff pieces.
  • the ecosystem craves honest and direct information in order to make fast decisions.
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9

I strongly agree that ownership of mistakes (from both sides partners and Atlassian) is an important element for healthy, fair and honest conversations in this community.
I’m both an Atlassian MP vendor and a customer using many Atlassian Products. My experience is when reporting bugs, bad UI, Rovo stuff-ups etc to Atlassian support, I do get legendary support, validation, ownership, feature requests or bug reports created on my behalf.

It is a slightly different story interfacing Atlassian as a MP vendor through this community. I personally do not encounter validation and ownership for obvious mis-steps or mistakes very often.
IMHO this could be one of the reasons that contribute to a souring tone in this community. Blame, assumptions, finger-pointing etc has no place here.
But honesty, ownership, validating each other’s experience and compassion has.

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10

Hey Chris and Atlassians,

I fully support the requirement to have a space where everyone feels comfortable discussing, commenting, and participating. I will do my best to rethink and reread my posts in this regard before pressing “reply”.

From my close to 10 years of experience in the Atlassian ecosystem, it becomes increasingly harder to be heard by Atlassian, to get our points across and ring the alarm bells. Ultimately, this leads to frustration. Some choose to try to respond with stronger, more direct language, some don’t participate in the public dialog and instead use backchannels. Others give up, walk away, and find ways to work around the issues or live with them.

For us, Forge is the main underlying factor of this friction and frustration, which often surfaces in RFCs and more high-level posts. For me, the fork in the road was when Atlassian pushed ahead with Forge without a clear Connect migration path, ignoring the fact that they were leaving the whole Marketplace behind. There can be as much marketing, incentives or penalties as you want, this was Atlassian’s decision and I do not understand it to this day. Forge should have had a clear migration path for Connect apps before it became the main app framework.

Where are we today? Atlassian is planning to financially penalize us for being on Connect while we are watching and waiting for Atlassian to develop the necessary tools to enable us to transition to Forge. I could write a lot more of what I feel has been/is going wrong on a fundamental level, but I think this illustrates the point well.

I understand that some decisions cannot be reversed, but at the very least, I hope that Atlassian is developing an understanding of the Marketplace Partner’s situation and changes its language and behavior beyond simply saying, “We hear you.”

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To echo many other responses above, we have a long history with Atlassian both as a customer (since 2008 in our case) and as a partner (since 2015).

The Atlassian Developer Community has, in our opinion, always been one of the few places on the internet where you can expect to find polite, intelligent discourse.

However, particularly this year, we feel that it has never been a harder time to be an Atlassian Partner.

The demands placed on us by constant change, “busy work” and (dare I say it) poorly considered choices (e.g. the most recent case in point) has become increasingly difficult to manage.

While I haven’t personally observed any recent incidents that I would classify as “bullying”, it does not surprise me at all that partner patience and diplomacy could be wearing thin.

In our small group, we (half-)joke that Atlassian employs a “feedback-driven-development” model, where changes are hastily announced with obvious flaws and limitations, and then refined based on inevitable complaints from partners.

There are obvious benefits in involving the community in design decisions (e.g. RFCs), but we feel there is a minimum level of consideration that isn’t being met by Atlassian before involving the community, leading to unnecessary angst by partners worried that their businesses are about to be materially impacted.

If there has been a recent change in community behaviour that prompted this post, I would encourage you and the team to look inward and consider what might be driving this change in behaviour.

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Hi @ChrisHemphill1 ,
Just to give you an impression of what we have to handle as a developer, here the things I had to “experience” in the last couple of weeks:

  1. Error in the newly released API for Live Docs, needing triage on my side and programming a workaround Please test & update your Confluence Cloud apps to function in Live docs by May 30, 2025 - #16 by marc
  2. Atlassian unannounced uses a new origin, leading to CSP errors in apps, requiring an emergency release to fix it from our side, New CSP warnings from *.atl-paas.net. Weeks later a “retroactive” changelog is posted with no acknowledgement of the problems, https://developer.atlassian.com/cloud/confluence/changelog/#CHANGE-2554. No report on the statuspage.
  3. Macro PDF export stops working, Exporting macro to pdf not working - #15 by marc , no report on the statuspage.
  4. Confluence starts copying page properties, Confluence Page Copy is now copying entity properties? . This lead to multiple tickets, confused customers which also opened tickets, there was no changelog entry and no report on the status page.
  5. Atlassian requires us to use new packages for development, yet does not use the packages themselves. Also releases a package with no code on npm, New @atlassian packages on NPM .
  6. We have a new paid license without payment. First line marketplace support thinks we are a solution partner and advises us to do something with billing, then nixes the license, then starts a new trial. Second line marketplace support is more helpful, however now we wait until the new trial is expired.
  7. Announcement of a new Forge cli version, Changes in the next major release of Forge CLI - #2 by marc . It seems Atlassian is not aware of the security vulnerabilities. This is also visible in https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/ECO-712 with low priority. I had opened an ECOHELP ticket earlier about the security vulnerabilities and was relegated to this ticket.
  8. Trying to add a resolver to a Forge app. Getting weird errors. Need to search through CDAC to find the issue: Taking the Ecosystem Forward: An Update on the Future of Connect - #16 by scottohara , which is a new low for me for Forge.

Given such an abundance of difficulties for marketplace vendors, it’s hard to keep believing that Atlassian does enough. These where all errors/difficulties. On top of that we need to move to Forge and (lastly) serve our customers?

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