[ndepoel]

Here's another: code was open sourced with every intention of becoming a thriving community-driven project, but in practice users only take from the code what they want for their own needs and never contribute back, or expect the maintainer to solve all of their integration issues for them. Eventually, the maintainer decides that they have better things to do than fixing other people's problems, and that there is more value to be had from bespoke contract work. Some updates still get pushed but over time the project gradually gets abandoned and the open source dream slowly passes away.

[foxglacier]

It sounds like the maintainer you're describing was underhandedly helping their users with the silent expectation that they also contribute back to the project and got bitter when it didn't happen that way.

Open source is altruistic, remember. You explicitly tell the world that you are happy for anyone to only take from the code what they want for their own needs and never contribute back. If you don't want to help users or develop your software alone, an alternative is to sell the software and support service to users and use the money to hire developers.

[to11mtm]

I think I know the pattern they are describing, and it's a semi-unfortunate one.

People make a fairly-complex open source thing. Due to the complexity for certain environments/cases, the author(s) have a commercial support option.

Consumers from bigorg use it, and wind up opening issues wanting free help for their niche use case, no they don't want to get a support contract, but this subset of the user base causes a lot of churn dealing with communication, politely closing such issues (after all, you want to just be polite about support options, not drive them away!)...

And sometimes, it becomes easier to just flip the license.

In the .NET ecosystem, it's come up frequently. There's the cases where I get it; PDF is hell (iTextSharp), Imaging is hell (ImageSharp), Auth is hell (IdentityServer).

But then there's the cases where I just shrug my shoulders (MediatR has plenty of alternatives) or get happy it gives me permission to gleefully get rid of a poorly used lib (AutoMapper).

[foxglacier]

It must be having their mindset set wrong for the situation. Are they a business out to make money? Then suck it up and accept they have to smooch their leads to convert them into paying customers. Or are they trying to build a community of altruistic developers and helpful users? Then just ignore any support requests that are too much. It's pretty common for open source devs to just leave issues sitting around without even acknowledging them or to close them without any comment.

I might be biased though because I enjoy helping users. I also sell commercial support for my software and sometimes both paying and unpaid users have big niche requests that go too far for my liking so I stop helping them on that. Sometimes I do feel bad that I spent so much energy on them but it's not bitterness and I blame myself for not saying "no" sooner, not the customer for simply asking. People are allowed to ask for things.