An open source project creates no obligation on the part of the developers. Open source licenses explicitly indemnify the authors. Receiving something for free and expecting something more is the essence of the entitled behavior that frustrate and burn out many open source developers.

A donation is a voluntary gift. Like any other gift, a donation to an open source project is understood to have no strings tied to it. Giving a dollar a month to a project doesn't entitle you to round-the-clock support. If you expect something more, have a conversation with the developers to work out a plan.

P.S.: we (https://sheetjs.com/) build and maintain open source projects (our largest is https://github.com/sheetjs/js-xlsx) and we turn down donations precisely because many people expect something in return. Instead, we offer actual paid support plans and additional features.

I meant a subconscious obligation, not a legal one. When somebody gives you a gift, it puts pressure on you (subconscious and social) to reciprocate. You see it all the time with youtube streamers, who frequently cater their content to their subscribers wishes to keep them happy. And to clarify, the streamers don't do this because their users are unhappy or protesting. They do it because they feel a sense of obligation to give their subscribers what they want because the subscribers were generous enough to give the streamer money.

For whatever reason, this phenomenon is completely lacking in the open source community. Instead, the opposite seems to occur. OSS developers are actively hostile toward their users, both vocally and how they react to criticism that their software isn't user friendly or respectful of their user's time. Anybody who has spent hours trying to set up a piece of OSS and then made the mistake of asking the developer for help can attest to this.

Most moderate sized projects have at least decent documentations, some channel for support, and there are a range of third party options to consult. The developer generally should not be who you contact.

Not my experience at all. Well sometimes bugs gets closed for no apparent reason etc but I've rarely been shouted at and I think more often than not they try to help.

And - if this approach that you are showing here is representative for how you communicate it might explain a bit ;-)

Edit: and yes, my approach has worked for years so either it is something I do that you don't or I'm just consistently lucky or something :-)

By all means please donate to projects you want to support. But 'donation' implies you aren't getting something in return. Otherwise it would be a 'purchase'.

Realistically, a $100 donation doesn't get much of my time anyway.

It's more of a pat on the back; people like what you're doing, and the way you're doing it; so keep going. (Don't do anything differently, just more of it.)

I see more passion in paid software in macOS when I see a beautiful UI because it shows that the developer actually wants me to use and enjoy his creation day to day.

Then, there are also badly run commetial projects, which are crap despite being paid for.

My OSS project, which I haven’t worked on in ages to be fair, I never made any effort to make it work anywhere but on Debian for example. I know some people used it in Suse and RHEL so it can’t have been too painful but I never had that as a goal.

This makes it hard to target 'linux' in general with polished software. The issue of package managers seems on its way to being solved by containers. However, the issue of desktop environments is much more thorny. As you can't really abstract away the metaphors with which a user communicates with his PC.

Years ago, I went through a phase getting the installer working well (cross platform) for a PostgreSQL replication project. FreeBSD, NetBSD, Solaris, RHEL, ... there might have been others too, it was a long time ago. ;)

Think about OSS software you've written and contributed to. 99% of time it is to scratch your own programmer centric itch.

Usability usually takes a backseat in OSS model as not many usability experts are working for free.

Same goes for documentation. It is autodoc or nothing.

I always go out of my way to help users who showed gratitude to me, either with a donation (those are very rare) or by being extra nice to me last time I helped them.

But obviously, users who insult my software and myself every time they have an issue come last on my list of priorities.

This is as much true as it is for developers of proprietary software.

There are many examples on both sides that make your statement false, also as many to make it true.

This sounds whiny and more importantly it isn't true its hard to get people to pay for things that they can have for free full stop.

Don't make things more complicated than they are.

OSS isn't polished many times. The installer might be missing. Documentation is out of date or incomplete. The plug-in manager requires using the file system explorer directly.

All of that cuts. OSS can be death by a thousand cuts at times.

Are you an OSS developer by chance?

> its hard to get people to pay for things that they can have for free full stop.

The Apple third party app ecosystem proves you wrong. Users are willing to pay for good software, even if there are free alternatives available.

People are disinclined to fund open source projects that they can get for free.

If you rely on voluntary donations you will find yourself poor.

They may be willing to pay for value added only if getting something for nothing isn't an option.

Then communicate your point better. Losing the hostility would be a great start.

The point being that anecdotally, windows doesn't have it down either.