His followup email linked by the OP is completely over the line, but I don't think this github post was objectionable. (Nor was the "pay me" response objectionable.)
> "Do you have a target date for the next release?"
Simply asking for such a thing isn't objectionable, he's not demanding it.
> "I'm trying to formulate our case for waiting, but need some kind of target date."
The way this is phrased, the "need" is something others are requiring of him, not something he is requiring from the mitmproxy developer. In this comment, he's making a request and explaining his commercial and personal motivation for his request. There wasn't any problem here until the guy came back with an email throwing around words like extortion.
I’m not a native speaker but the way I read it is that FrugalGuy needs some kind of target date. So FrugalGuy is asking mhils for a target date. Which is the opposite of what you’re saying.
More like "I've been subletting the appartment you have been providing to me for free and now my tenants are complaining that the company that made the paint also made lead paint. Can you please repaint all the walls even though you already checked that your building didn't use any of the lead paint so that I can continue to profit off of your house without paying you anything, kthx."
The original comment was already at the very least, absolutely tone deaf.
Edit to replies: Both the context and the employer were in the original post. Blasting the actual GitHub issue when it's clear the author specifically tried to avoid that is awful behavior too.
Just as calling the maintainer's offer extortion is not correct, I think it's also to call the email a threat is not correct. It's at worst entitled and slightly aggressive in the part that we saw.
It's pretty shocking that someone in the industry so long thinks that OSS maintainers owe him anything though, or that he didn't think to simply fork his own version - he must know this is an option. He's probably read the MIT license at some point in his career - has he never stopped to think about what to provide something 'as-is' means? His position suggests that he has the resources available to do a lot of things that were far less embarrassing than asking someone who owes him nothing to make his job easier.
I don't think the person was important but the employer might. It seems to be IBM which is not surprising I guess, although I'd hoped that RedHat would influence how they work with open source somehow.
> "Do you have a target date for the next release?"
Simply asking for such a thing isn't objectionable, he's not demanding it.
> "I'm trying to formulate our case for waiting, but need some kind of target date."
The way this is phrased, the "need" is something others are requiring of him, not something he is requiring from the mitmproxy developer. In this comment, he's making a request and explaining his commercial and personal motivation for his request. There wasn't any problem here until the guy came back with an email throwing around words like extortion.