It's not just free/libre/open source software that has this issue.

I run an email security SaaS business. It's closed source, but the suite is free of charge to use for personal, non-commercial domains.

We get numerous support requests each day of users on the free tier (who are obviously commercial users btw) that DEMAND us to fix all sorts of email problems for them. They regularly threaten that they will write a bad review on $_SOCIAL_NETWORK if we don't fix their email delivery issues for free. It's frustrating and also exhausting to try to stay professional towards these 'customers'.

Interesting observation: This behavior seems to be culture dependent. I'd say about 90% of our over-demanding free-tier users are from the same region on the planet.

As someone who's gone back and forth on licensing for personal projects over the years, tried to engage user communities for said personal projects, and tried to use various open source projects — I totally sympathize with the maintainers. As with a lot of things in life, user engagement is a two-way street. If folks want constructive engagement from the users, there needs to be constructive engagement from the maintainers.

From the user POV it can be very frustrating to use open source projects. Gordon's highlighted some real bottom-of-the-barrel end users and it would be hard to invalidate his experience with a straight face. OTOH some projects are incredibly hostile to users. Projects like Elixir/mix, Electron/VSCode, Thunderbird, and GIMP. How are users supposed to react when the sole maintainer packs up and leaves indefinitely? Or when patches are submitted upstream and the maintainers tell the users to pound sand?

Currently I'm working on a car-related Pi project. I'm not a hardware guy though, so I've done some research and discovered a piece of hardware that looks nearly perfect for my use case. They even have the specific version I'm interested in listed on their store. The only catch is that it's listed as 4-6 weeks out (and has been for a while). Their response? Sorry, we've moved on to something more interesting to us at 3x the price. No the store hasn't been updated (same with their blog and forums). I'm ready to fork over money, but with only sporadic signs of life it's difficult.

> How are users supposed to react ...

Answers:

1) fork the project, and do a better job yourself

2) suck it up quietly

You've articulated two great reasons why end users generate angry comments.

I'm not following the jump from some commercial product turning out to be vaporware to it being an OSS problem.

> I'm not following the jump from some commercial product turning out to be vaporware to it being an OSS problem.

They're all open source projects. Sure, I can grab the Gerber files and try my hand at surface mount soldering. But like any open source project where the build system is too archaic it's massively beneficial to start from an already assembled version.

For comparison's sake, what percent of your total users are from that region?

> Interesting observation: This behavior seems to be culture dependent. I'd say about 90% of our over-demanding free-tier users are from the same region on the planet.

I wonder where this is...?!

Mine are 90% in USA - which, I think, was your point?

Actually, I had not point. I was just wondering.

I've always noticed "free" in general has all kinds of strange side-effects.

Sometimes charging a nominal amount (like $1) filters most aberrant behavior.

Just out of curiosity: in your experience, do you think offering a free tier instead of a short time-limited trial pays off in terms of attracting paid customers?

Since ours is GPL, that's our free tier. The supported/hosted/training version is paid, first, 15 day full refund then pro-rated. 15 works better than 30 for us.

So, the people that pay nothing, consider your time worth nothing?

Can you eliminate the free tier, or is that part of funneling to paid users?

Partly it's funneling, but mostly the idea is that we want to offer a 'safe' environment for evaluating the tech. We see customers who use our software for a personal domain for a while, and then introduce it at work, or tell a colleague/friend about it. Word-of-mouth marketing goes a long way.

But, due to the group of over-demanding free tier users we are considering to switch to a limited time free trial.

> This behavior seems to be culture dependent. I'd say about 90% of our over-demanding free-tier users are from the same region on the planet.

I don’t like this dog whistle and the rest of your comment was perfectly fine without it.

That said, there are entitled assholes everywhere. I got an email one time asking me for source code for a university project because the guy had found I graduated that course 2 years before him, and he didn’t want to do the work.

> I don’t like this dog whistle and the rest of your comment was perfectly fine without it.

It’s not like he called anyone out specifically. If it’s a true observation, what’s wrong with telling us about it? That it’s culture dependant is an interesting note.

That’s not a dog whistle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics

What’s forcing you to even respond, let alone provide support?