It's not at simple as that.

The patch author does the "initial" work. But then it's up to the team to learn the patch, understand it and keep maintaining it.

Every line of code is baggage.

If there is no demand for something at the time, it makes sense for maintainers to reject that. It's up to them to maintain that patch from now on.

There is another scenario, I submitted a Pull Request to a OSS project, the authors discussed it and rejected it and then implemented it in the exact same way as I did. That was hurtful.

I can't upvote your comment for some reason, but exactly this

>Telling them “no” isn’t going to make them focus instead on the project leadership’s other priorities like it would in a corporate team.

No one is asking them to. An open source project is not a corporation, it has no shareholders who require growth at all costs. So someone doesn't contribute to the project, if there's enough other contributors to keep it healthy then who care? No need to try and get every single potential contributor to contribute code to the project.

You can’t pay an opportunity cost on an opportunity you don’t have. Whatever the reason for rejecting the patch in this case, it is not a missed opportunity to work on bugs and tech debt as suggested by the parent.

Honestly, if someone's spending time working on a high value open source project (which PG absolutely is), I'd rather they spend less time (than I do) crafting their internet comments to sound nice and more time contributing to society. And I hope people who actually use the product feel the same way, understand why every single use case can't be carefully considered every time it comes up, and don't take it personally.

> crafting their internet comments to sound nice

It's not hard.

One thought. Perhaps it comes easier to you than it does to other folks. We all have different skills, and sometimes what looks like malice is really just incompetence. I find that assuming positive intent adds more value to my life than doing the opposite.

A second, separate thought. Perhaps it's not quite as easy as you think it is, and perhaps you're not as good at it as you think you are. Case in point, the comment you just made was not exactly the nicest I've read today.

IMHO it's way more complicated than it seems, because of a mix of technical, cultural and personal reasons.

- technical: E-mail is not a particularly good medium to convey emotions (in either way). For example someone with a naturally terse communication style may be perceived as harsh, while in person he's actually a very friendly bloke. And there's no way to communicate this impression back.

- cultural: Often what is quite polite in one culture may be seen as quite impolite or even rude in another. It's not just country vs. country, but even region vs. region (like for example East Coast vs. West Coast).

- personal: People in the community may know each other pretty well, in which case the communication style may be quite a bit more direct. But others may lack the context.

It's almost impossible to get it right all the time, without resorting to entirely mechanical corporate communication style. Which is not fut at all.

Of course, this does not mean there are no truly harsh / rude / WTF posts (even on PostgreSQL lists). But I'd say most of the time it's not meant that way.