As the original article notes, "bug reports" are actually poorly worded "support tickets", which in all commercial software are not free.
Usually my deadlines aren't so far in the horizon that I can wait for an unpaid maintainer to come up with and release a fix. If the problem is that easy to fix, I've probably already fixed it on my end and am just tossing a patch over the wall as an afterthought: use it verbatim, use it as inspiration, throw it out - just please don't take it as an insult. If the problem is a very hard fix, while I was discovering how hard it would be I was simultaneously researching alternatives (including rolling my own), and the bug report is me delivering a summary of why I thought the problem might be hard to fix and some ideas, although there might be a criticism of a claim in there too. The criticism might be considered a request for support - not for the software, but for the webpage making the false claim. I've also probably already moved on.
Testing isn't free, either.
edit: when I really think about it, I never want to file bugs and always think of it as work. I do it out of a responsibility to contribute back to the software or because I like the maintainer. I do it because when I google problems I'm running into, bugtrackers come up with someone else describing the same problem I'm having and what they did to fix it. I would prefer not to file bugs and have to make myself do it by putting filing the bug into my schedule.
From your perspective, I can guess that it does seem wild. The issue is that you're getting paid for fixing other people's bugs. He's not.
And, no, we don't fix "other people's bugs" either, just ours.
Or do you think that reading and comprehension are activities that take no time at all, and therefore have no cost attached to them?
I do feel that’s an important point — paid or otherwise. There’s a similarly whiny attitude people have: “I paid $5 for your thing, so you have to do as I say!” I don’t really think the distinction is how much it cost. If you have a support contract that says “in exchange for paying me, I’ll help you with X, Y, and Z”, that’s a different story.
But what I really wanted to remark on: to the point of “activities that take no time at all”, when I report a bug, I often spend hours of my time trying to understand what’s broken, narrowing it down to specific conditions and observations, often a attempting to fix it myself, and then writing everything up and whenever possible including test cases, screenshots, videos, etc. By the time I hit send on that bug, I may have contributed hundreds or thousands of dollars of my time to the project.
It’s also possible to just take 5 seconds to fire off “your stupid app is broken your stupid too fix it”. All I’m saying is that painting all bug reports with the brush of “trying to get free support” discounts the amount of free QA open source projects can benefit from.
Sure, but that was you deciding to do it, and it's commendable.
This is very different from someone emailing you and telling you to (or expecting that you will) donate thousands of dollars of your time to a project.
It's not a bug if it doesn't affect my use-case. It's undefined behaviour at most.
It might even be a bug if you compare to my specification, but, again, unless I have some reason to care about it (money, wanting the project to be good) then it's not a bug.
This aspect is not specific to open source either. In my book, maintainers of proprietary software, and I'm one of those, are also making a huge mistake if they ignore bug reports from users. But in open source, it goes further, by inviting contributions even in form of patches for bugs or improvements. Not allowing any of those is what I call stupid in the above post.
Do you mean that the developer caused them? Because that is _mostly_ true but not always (because you can have bugs reported to you that are upstream ones).
Do you mean that developers are responsible for fixing them? That is simply false, even in commercial software you have no moral imperative to fix bugs, and very often with good business strategy you ignore a lot of inconsequential bugs.
Just about any serious FOSS developer I know has commercial software development experience, so I don't think your opinion is as unique as you might imagine.
Even if they come from someone who’s pirating your software instead of paying for it?
It is usually very easy to tell if the problem is caused by a half-assed cracking or if it's a genuine issue. If it's the latter, then, yes, we certainly act on it. Doesn't mean that we follow up with the submitter though.
Also, don't mistake bug reports for support queries. These are two completely separate things.
Moreover, if the reporter also helps us with resolving it, i.e. provides logs, stack traces, runs custom builds, etc., then we will always reciprocate with freebies.
So seeing that this person is forcing people to pay to report bugs is absolutely wild.
I understand that he's basically sharing his own tools with others for free and if it works for him that all that he cares about, but the bugs are always on the developer. The least you can do is accept a report and say Thanks. That's a complete no-brainer.