I, and a number of other people that possibly includes you, like programming enough that we do it for free.

I don't like doing free tech support for entitled mean people on GitHub, which is what you're really asking about, but I'm perfectly happy to throw code over the fence for the general public to use if they don't bother me about it.

What happens if the log4j developers just... don't fix the bug? Other people who rely on the library fork it, development continues with more funding, the world keeps turning, and maybe a few tens of millions of dollars of additional economic damage are inflicted in a diffuse fashion across the global tech industry.

The thing is, if you aren't getting paid, people can demand all they want. Scream until their faces turn blue, stomp their feet, bawl like a baby, write mean things on twitter, stick a voodoo doll full of needles.

It's entirely your prerogative to say no.

It isn't nice though, as the maintainer. I gave up on doing any kind of open source stuff probably a decade ago for way less than screaming. Just getting bug reports is depressing, it was a relief to walk away and never have to think about it again. I know I didn't owe people anything, but hearing that I'd written buggy incomplete code (which worked and was good enough for me) sucked the joy out of it all.

For me, getting bug reports and feature requests is actually fun and makes the project more interesting. It is telling me that someone uses my software seriously and the bug was worth reporting. Many people don't report bugs because it takes some effort.

It can be, yeah, it just ground me down in the end. Deciding to stop was a huge weight off, I can only imagine the stress someone running a big successful project must feel.

> Just getting bug reports is depressing…

I’ve always found people are reasonably happy when I send them big reports — though I always either send a fix or, if I can’t figure it out on my own, a test program that demonstrates the problem.

The last time was for some random library I was writing a python wrapper for and the author seemed way too happy to be getting a bug report for the code he based his master’s thesis on. Pretty amusing to be perfectly honest.

Idk I used to run some big projects and I just told people straight up that I’d love to add or fix that but that I don’t have time

Some people still idolized the hell out of me

Yes, I like working for free. I tried doing open source work for money but the only thing that happened was that I lost all motivation. It stopped being fun and became yet another job. And I make more than enough money from my main job.

For free? Hell no, I work for GitHub stars.