> Not that you're necessarily wrong, but you can 'fire' those 'customers' too. For sure -- and you should! But in my mind, the goals of FOSS can differ wildly

> Not that you're necessarily wrong, but you can 'fire' those 'customers' too. For sure -- and you should! But in my mind, the goals of FOSS can differ wildly from a company wanting to release a great open source product, but also turn some of those users into paying customers. If your goal is simply the betterment of free software for developers, you take any and all contributions, as long as the code is of good quality and solves someones needs. If your goal is to figure out what features are needed by people who might be willing to pay if they were solved, you then have to figure out a way to filter the contributions and what you're willing to contribute back. It's just a trade off. > I find it a tad hypocritical that 99% of people who post on HN consume tons and tons of open-source every day and yes, they also want the edge cases to work and yet, not only are they not actively participating to make the body of free (as in freedom) software larger, they're actively discouraging people from contributing. Working in open source is tough -- it's many times a thankless job. I was one of the team members of Kandan (https://github.com/kandanapp/kandan https://github.com/kandanapp/kandan), which was a Slack clone with ~2.5k stars, and as much as we helped people, sometimes it also felt like it never was enough. One of the few helpful things that came from being true FOSS was that most people had an understanding that we did this as volunteer work, so they weren't upset when features or changes took long, or weren't merged into the app. But if the goal is to eventually move customers into other products, or onto a premium tier, it becomes a different game with different rules.