This was so so my experience.
The people that contacted me were, in the majority, some of the most entitled assholes.
I quit reading the email address associated w/ my open source project, and one user tracked down my (then) work email to demand support!
Re:WiringPi – deprecated
by stjohnswarts on Saturday August 24, 2019 @12:53AM
(#20785305)
Learned my lesson. If I release something now I put it under MIT license and add some decent documentation and hopefully the code is well written and commented enough that any half way decent programmer can make use of it. No contact mail, no grief.
Re:WiringPi – deprecated
by groundlogic on Friday August 23, 2019 @07:48PM
(#20783984)
It's super weird for a "developer" to demand assistance from another developer, just because they wrote and published the code, regardless of license.
Re:WiringPi – deprecated
by banana_giraffe on Friday August 23, 2019 @07:57PM
(#20784039)
Sorry if I came of suggesting that. At least in my case the only people demanding support were end-users of applications I didn't write but did use my code. Developers that contacted me were always understanding, with a rare exception, that free stuff got free support.
Most of it included my real name and email address in the executable and DLLs details tab, as well as the source code. I was the top of the little niche, and more than happy to help other developers out there. I'd help users as best as I could, but my tools were mostly geared at developers (though, users never stopped amazing me at clever unintended ways to use things)
The emails I got from this could be broken down into two categories: Actual questions about the tools, including bug reports or problems integrating it into some other project. That was about 5% of the emails I saw. The other 95% was "Program <x> stopped working! I can't find any contact anywhere expect in this one DLL, I demand you help me fix it!"
It was super disheartening, since my attempt to explain my role as someone that provided a tool or library to whoever wrote their application was responded with either "Your name is in this application, I don't care what your role is, you need to help me fix it!", or "If you didn't want to provide support, why is your email here?"
And that's, basically, how I ended up using random combinations of words on sites like this one. Maybe people with a thicker skin can deal with this crap, but I can't anymore.