[Ragnarork]

What must have gone horribly wrong during the course of software history that led to people acting so entitled about free open source projects?

You use it, you evaluate then accept the consequences. You don't? Well Patch it. You can't? Use an alternative. Nothing else available? Fork it and fix it.

If nothing works for you, then either you're the problem, or the entire field has an unsolved problem (and you're not helping, especially when slamming people working for free trying to solve it, even if not correctly or the way you'd like).

[cloverich]

The thing that changed is we began building off of more and more open source, and so it became more and more important. Nobody is expecting a project's original creator to slave over it eternally. They are instead expecting them to clearly signal their intentions. A "Not Maintained" flag, or "Read my design philosophy before using", after understanding community expectations, is no effort and a reasonable expectation. Counter arguments like to think we are islands and that because we never signed an official contract, we have no responsibilities to anyone but ourselves. But that is not how society ever has or ever will work, and there never has nor ever will be any such thing as "leaving" society (other than death). There's a social contract that you are (unwillingly) a part of, and that's reality. Entitlement here is merely people implicitly recognizing that fact.

EDIT: This rant is a general reply to your general sentiment, not a specific reply to this particular case. I have no idea whether the author did in fact signal appropriately their design, risk, etc.

[sneak]

This is an oversimplified view. One could say the same thing about eg free services from Google or Facebook.

It doesn't prevent us from saying "operating in this way is bad/destructive", even if one chooses not to use the code or service.

[charonn0]

It all went wrong when the number of users exceeded the number of programmers.