[repomies6999]

While I don't regret it, last experiences with open source probably made me to not do it again. Essentially people seemed to assume that if I release a project, it also means that I'm require to provide free support for it, etc. The attitude from users of the software was depressing - in fact to me it feels that my paying customers are nicer on average.

[manyxcxi]

I think it's human nature to not value things that are free the same way we value things we have to pay or spend effort for. It makes sense that it follows to open source projects as well, though I'm often appalled at some of the requests and tickets on some of the open source libraries I use and contribute to.

If I see an unanswered 'dumb' question that's relatively recent I'll try and answer it in such a way that the maintainer(s) can effectively just close the ticket and be done with it.

Without contributing code I hope that me giving them 2-10min of their life back is a small but welcomed bit of help for them.

[SyneRyder]

Similar feeling here. I released something open source, others started contributing to it (which is rare! so that's awesome!) but their commits started breaking things for others. That meant I'd get the complaints, and I had to spend a lot of unpaid time fixing their bugs. There were ongoing debates as well from contributors (and non-contributors!), and that's how I learned what the word "bikeshedding" means :)

Instead of giving something for free to the world, I'd accidentally created an unpaid job & ongoing drama for myself (ie a net-negative for me personally, instead of at least being a neutral / zero).

With my commercial software, I'm being paid by customers to help them, and the better I make the software, the more likely people are to buy it. The incentives align. Those paying customers are mostly nicer to me as well, some wonderful compliments. And none of them have ever debated GPL vs BSD vs MIT with me - they just want the software to work, work well, and be beautiful & easy to use.

[Sholmesy]

The free users have no skin in the game. If they don't get what they want, they're on to the next one.

The paid users see your products value, and use it to solve a problem of theirs. They ask for fixes/features because it would make a bigger difference to them.

[rhlala]

Pretty sad comment.. I though the vast majority of open-source users were devs...

[shimo5037]

At first most of your users tend to be fairly advanced. After all, they've even managed to somehow find the obscure thing you've made. This is the most rewarding time for an open source project as many of the issues are real and the quality of bug reports and feedback is extremely high. Over time, as the project gains popularity, many of these issues will either have been solved, or have become easily googlable. Therefore you'll rarely hear from the advanced, intelligent portion of your users, although it's also certainly possible that they've already moved on to shinier things.

In the end, you tend to have a noticeable, vocal portion of users whom I'd generously call "social developers," who are bad at figuring things out by themselves and/or prefer asking things from another person to save a few minutes of their own time. Many of these users are very draining to deal with.

[butterfi]

Dev's can be jerks too.

[xioxox]

It depends on the project. Most of the people using my GUI plotting software Veusz [1] are not devs. Therefore I get a lot of questions on how to use it, bug reports, complaints and feature suggestions, but little in the way of code.

[1] https://veusz.github.io/

[pmarreck]

> in fact to me it feels that my paying customers are nicer on average.

I've seen this said quite a few times in many contexts

[nqzero]

not sure about your particular case

but a problem that i run into often as a user of open source software is that in many cases the readme or other promotional material makes generous claims about quality or performance that the softwares fail to live up to. and in those cases i'm quick to bash the authors

open source doesn't excuse false advertising