Huh nothing you said indicates it is a professional project. Sleek does not equal professional.

The easy way to tell is to remember if you're paying them or not.

Absolutely not. You can get professional (but not necessarily timely) support from me for multiple projects I maintain on GitHub, for free.

For many people, their personal interest in open source is writing code for fun and showing it off. For others, it's making a product that people can rely on. The second one is my motivation; don't take that away from me.

That’s fine. It’s even admirable if you to do that. But it isn’t and shouldn’t be mandatory.

While “mandatory” would be a stretch, I don’t think there’s anything unreasonable about expecting project owners not to overstate the maintenance level of their projects. Deliberately conveying a false impression to people is called lying, and it’s generally regarded as being bad.

The distinction between "amatuer" and "professional" is literally the motivation for the action, i.e. if you are doing it for enjoyment vs if you are doing it to get paid or advance your career.

If you are making products that people can rely on primarily because you enjoy it, you are literally an amatuer.

There are figurative connotations of quality and polish implicit with those terms, but I find those connotations unfortunate and in many cases unwarranted.

Sure. I'm not saying I am a professional. I'm saying I will provide professional-style support (according to the connotation), just not necessarily in a timely fashion, and it's demoralizing when other people say you should avoid my amateur software because they're leaning on the connotations of "amateur" and "professional."

That's not true at all. You can pay for amateur bullshit, and you can get professional software and support for free (and free as in freedom).

You can get professional software and support for free, until you can’t. This “you’ve provided me free support once, so it’s your obligation to support me for free indefinitely whenever I ask” attitude has certainly contributed to my open source exhaustion as a maintainer.

Well, good luck getting a company you paid for a product to provide indefinite support, large professional software companies cancel projects and EOL software all the time.

You only have a right to complain about the amateur bullshit you paid for, though.

You have a right to complain about anything and everything.

For instance, I don't pay a penny for HN but I can complain that these discussions sometimes become self-congratulatory prattle where angry people carrying a giant chip on their shoulder posit absurd, completely ridiculous notions and they're supported in their group delusion by like-minded parrots. You don't have to agree with my complaint, but nor do I need your or anyone else's permission to hold it.

My Ethernet is stuck in ipv6, professionally tell me how to fix it, for free.

That's not an open source project any of us maintain.

Also, there are expectations for both sides of a professional interaction. My employer buys various fancy networking equipment for lots of money and we absolutely wouldn't expect an answer for that question.

Sure, could you provide some more detail?

I actually did that for years in a linux forum.