[swatcoder]

I agree that those are bad examples in this context, but the underlying problem is real.

As a trade community, developers have come to treat open source projects as commercial vendors that they simply don't have to pay for -- they place support and roadmap demands on maintainers and regularly whip themselves up into a fury of frustrated entitlement when maintainers don't abide by those demands.

For passionate volunteers and part-time contributors, this dynamic is unsustainable and we've seen a continuously growing trend of maintainers burning out from the way they and their projects have come to be treated.

What we have now is not the vision of open source that many were fighting for 20 and 40 years ago. It's a bigger part of development than anyone back then could have imagined, but its mode of growth came with toxic consequences that erode the sense of camaraderie, enthusiasm, communalism, and good will that the whole effort was originally built upon.

We're on track for a collapse of open source, where mature, healthy projects figure out new ways to protect maintainers, largely by putting strict qualifiers on their licenses and making less and less stuff truly Free and Open.

[beekaywhopper]

Does this actually happen? Can you help me find some examples of commercial vendors (who don't contribute to the project substantially) putting support and roadmap demands on maintainers and then let loose on those maintainers when it doesn't meet a deadline? I'm having trouble figuring out if this actually happens regularly.