[nabilhat]

For the most part, the people that the product is offered to don't insist that the creator do work on demand. A small portion of obnoxious users make a point of insisting that the creator who already gave away their work for free remains under some kind of obligation to do more work.

For the most part, creators giving away their work for free don't insist that the people it's offered to accept it. A small portion of obnoxious creators make a point of insisting that some portion of people who aren't using it are obligated to use their work.

Obnoxious users are effectively discouraging, because not only does the population of users outnumber the population of open source authors by many orders of magnitude, not only also because the population of those who don't have the skills to do it themselves or contribute in a functional way is entirely contained within the 'users' category, but most importantly because each obnoxious user has only the authors of the few open source projects that they're using to be obnoxious to. Open source creators who talk about obnoxious users (usually without naming them) are often effectively criticized within the vast hordes of users.

Obnoxious open source creators are easily ignored, since there are so few of them, and they have millions (give or take an order of magnitude or two) of potential users to harrass. Open source users talk about these open source creators (usually calling them out by name), and those creators become well known as obnoxious cranks to be avoided.

[chmod600]

Maybe obnoxious people aren't the problem. Maybe reasonable people are.

After all, I wouldn't lose sleep over an obnoxious person making an obnoxious demand. They'd be summarily ignored.

But I would feel a tinge of guilt if someone made a good faith effort to offer an improvement, and the contribution was technically sound, but I just didn't get to it.